Embedded - 77: Goldfish, Fetch My Slippers!

Episode Date: November 20, 2014

Sophi Kravitz (@SophiKravitz, G+) joined us to talk about working on neat things: Wobble World, Oculus Rift, Unity, goldfish training, and BlueStamp Engineering. Sophi's company is Mix Engineering Leap Motion vs. Microsoft Kinect Goldfish driving (vid) Quit Your Day Job on Element14, previously on Super Green Dot Advertising in SkyMall Thermoelectric Firestarter

Welcome to Embedded, the show for people who love gadgets. I'm Alicia White, back with my co-host Christopher White. Our guest is Sophie Kravitz, electrical engineer extraordinaire. Hi Sophie, thanks for joining us today. Hi, nice to talk to you guys. Thank you. Your bio on Twitter or Google Plus says engineer, hacker, interactive artist and maker. That's pretty broad. So what is it that you do? I have a company called Mix Engineering. And under that company name, I make a living as an electronics consultant.

So that's a lot of things. I do a lot of paying jobs, including electronic design work, coding. I advise a company with product design, and I have one product that I do applications and service support. So it's just as broad what you do professionally is your description. Pretty much, yes. I consider myself pretty lucky that I spend about 80% of my time making a living and the other 20% of my time is spent building interactive design projects or what I call research for interactive design projects. Can you give me an example? Shall we jump right into Oculus?

Sure, we got to talking before the show. So yes, the Oculus Rift, the VR headset. It's been out for a couple of years, but it got... Well, it's a development kit. It's not a product yet. Right. And we don't hate them even though they got bought by Facebook because we just try not to hate people. It makes a little sense that you just don't hate them even though they got bought by facebook because we just try not to make a little sense that you just don't think about it yeah okay so that's so i haven't thought

about that at all about them being bought by facebook or otherwise people got i live in new york so i'm not that close yeah but you're actually doing some development with it. You're building something to use it, not just playing around watching the demos. Chris, are you just watching demos? Mostly. I had some ideas, but it seemed like work once I thought about it long enough. Well, and he has a lot more work than I do right now, so he's actually working. So you have actual work to do. You don't have the 20% time set up for research.

Well, I do have 20% time, but it's not for research. It's mostly for... Kerbal? Kerbal space program. So I saw somebody else's project a little bit over a year ago, somebody else's project using the Oculus Rift. And they had done a remake of an arcade game called Paper Boy or Paper Dude. You ride a bicycle and throw papers.

Yes, it was pretty awesome when I tried it. And I was like, well, I want to build something like this. And so somebody from NYC Resistor, which is a hackerspace in New York City, lent me the first version. It was kind of amazing. I put it out to the group and two people actually offered to lend me an Oculus Rift because it made them sick to their stomachs. Yes. So I borrowed the first one for about a month,

and then I returned that, and I borrowed a second one, and I started working in Unity, which I didn't... I'm not a graphics person at all, but somebody said you could build games for free in Unity. So that's... Yeah, and Unity's.NET-based, if I recall correctly? It is. The language you end up coding in, yeah.

Yep, you end up coding in C Sharp. Or you can use JavaScript or this other language called Boo. Boo. Boo, which I have not used, but apparently it's like Python. I'm totally adding that to my Halloween jokes list. What language do ghosts prefer? Boo. Exactly. Okay. adding that to my halloween jokes list what language do ghosts prefer exactly okay so so yeah unities um i tell people when i'm trying to convince them to work in it that it's very much like photoshop and then you just write some things to make stuff move around okay

photoshop with a third a z a z, so you can go in and out. And then if you want to animate things, you write some scripts. That's one of the things I've always found kind of daunting about graphics work and what stops me from doing a lot of projects is you end up running against, you have to have some art. You have to have some objects and things that look nice to put on the screen. That's not my development strength. What have you done in your work?

Have you actually gotten into the art part of it? I started making a world, and then I got lucky enough to team up with three artists. And they made the world. Yeah. And they made an awesome world for me to put other stuff into it. So the Oculus itself, putting it into Unity, it's ridiculously easy. It's the first one, the DK one, we can

complain about the new one shortly. But I mean, it's pretty much just you put it in and put in a plugin and boom, you're done. It's not really, there's not much to think about. And you definitely don't need to be a developer to put oculus into a unity world uh i added some other hardware though um fans to simulate wind oh neat yeah that um that was pretty exciting for me because i couldn't find any tutorials on how to do it. So I just opened a port and sent some data. Actually, the accelerometer data from my phone. I linked that up to the fan. Okay.

Unity has a class for accelerometers and gyroscopes and cameras. There's a fourth thing, but I don't remember what that is. So it's basically like get acceleration.x and you set your phone up and the data comes in. And from there, it's just maybe filtering it or doing some processing. I didn't realize they had APIs for that kind of thing in Unity. Well, if I could just complain a little bit,

they have it for edit mode. And I just found out just... You could actually read my whole rant on the Unity website or on their forums. It doesn't work when you build a game. Why is that? Apparently, I mean, they say so in the documentation. And as I apologize to their support people, I read what I wanted to.

But I also feel like if you make a class that's called Get Accelerometer or something like that, I mean, why would I even think it wouldn't work in a game yeah what other purpose does it have to test um the purpose of having the the android or the iphone connect to the game is you could test a game on a phone i I see. And that part I understand. But the fact that they link into the hardware, I mean, very, very easily too, it didn't occur to me. So two months of developing with the accelerometer from my phone, and I own a few phones now because I was testing accelerometers on the phone

and to find out that it actually doesn't work. But on the bright side, they released the source code for doing that. So I imagine I'll just start with my own accelerometer. And Alicia, I think we actually, you were very helpful with me on Skype a few weeks ago. I was kind of asking you about that. There are many lovely accelerometers out there. You don't have to stick to your phone if you can actually work with the code.

It doesn't look super complex. Yeah. But I'm boggled. I am actually reading your rant so before we go back to before we get deep into complaints about oculus and various various api what is the project you're building yeah what is the overall goal yeah right that's that yeah so the project and i'll just preface that by saying i'm pretty much done with the project i'm going to move on to a new project with all the things that I learned.

But the project was where you stand on a wobble board. The phone's accelerometer is on the wobble board. And if you lean forward, you move forward in the game. Backwards, you move backwards, right and left. So you can do everything but twist. And the accelerometer is just linked to moving through the world. Okay. So it's like a segue for yep the oculus rift world that's kind of cool that makes sense yeah it's pretty fun um

you can make a world with fun terrains and kind of skate up and over oh and then you put a motor underneath it so that you have to lean properly. When you're going uphill, it pushes you back. Oh, that's a really good idea. You also added a leap motion to this so you could see your hands. That was one of the things I found really creepy about the Oculus was there was a body and when I moved my hands, it didn't. i i felt very possessed by demons so one of the artists um takafumi ed he put in the leap motion um that basically yeah you could use your hands to knock over signs okay to knock over signs yeah if you're moving along oh oh kind of like slalom when they take down the poles oh yeah okay something like that you could just knock stuff over

i mean keep in mind like the three the four of us we worked together for about two months to put this thing together so i think we would have fleshed it out much more. I mean, if we continue working on a new project together, we would. The Leap Motion and the Oculus and the serial-based, well, it's like an Arduino with a custom fan driver thing. And the phone, as you can imagine, on my ultralight computer laptop. Some of these things fought with each other. Yeah. And the Leap is really power hungry.

It uses like an amp. Yeah, when people talk about using the Leap in embedded systems, I'm like, yeah, and your processor's got to be huge, and then you still have to truck around a car battery. Yeah. I mean, it's meant to be plugged into a computer. And a wall. I mean, not just a computer. Right.

And then, Chris, if you hadn't gotten to this part yet, the DK2 only works with USB 2.0. And this is on the Oculus. We're back to the Oculus part. On the Oculus, right. And then the Leap only works on USB 3.0. And this is on the Oculus. We're back to the Oculus. On the Oculus, right. And then the Leap only works on USB 3.0. It does? Yes.

It must be a new Leap, because the one I had worked on USB 2 a while back. Oh, okay. Yeah, because it came out a while ago. Yeah, the one that I have is not new. It just has that 3.0 plug. Hmm. And, you know, you might be right. I might be just using the 3.0 originally for speed.

Yeah, I'm not. The computer I have has USB 3, but I'm pretty sure I used it with an earlier one that didn't. That in and of itself is an interesting little product, but do you want to describe it for people yeah the leap is a little tiny he's totally using his hands about three inches by one inch or so and you set it on your desk and i think it has infrared cameras and possibly illumination and uh it kind of detects where your hands are above that space and tries to figure out where your fingers are and their orientation and that's basically it and people can build user interfaces gesture recognition using all that it sounds much

it's very cool but it's another one of those things it's like well okay it doesn't quite work perfectly it It's on the edge of awesome. Yeah. That was my experience. What was yours? I think it falls short completely. I don't think it works well at all. Yeah.

So, I mean, you know, it's kind of awesome for those of us who like to develop with the stuff, but when you want to demo it to make an experience for someone, I really only like to work with things that really work. And that work consistently and don't need to be babied. I'm tired of gadgets that need my engineering skills to work. Yeah, definitely. And I felt that way about Leap especially. Have you used Connect, Sophie? I have. Not much, but I've used it, yeah. Can you compare them? I haven't used both.

I think that Connect works pretty well because it just really has to detect something flashing by if you're doing broad gestures. And I do mean the Microsoft Connect, but... Yeah, yeah, Microsoft, yeah, sorry. Whereas the Leap is meant to catch fiddly finger stuff. And while it does, it has a lag. And then, of course, there's the power issue.

And it gets really hot, which I don't like. It's pretty small. I'm surprised there's the power issue. And it gets really hot, which I don't like. It's pretty small. I'm surprised it's not more efficient. I mean, it's not bigger than a credit card. I think there's some bright infrared LEDs in there. Oh. I mean, it's thick, but it's not really very big. I found that it would work maddeningly.

Like, you'd just get some manipulation thing, and you'd have something in your, in your virtual hand or what have you, and it would work and you'd be surprised and excited. And then it would like flip out, like your hand would flip upside down, the whole thing would fly apart, whatever you were holding. And it's like, okay, that's, you know, if I'm working this in a, in a CAD program or something or using it for real work, that's just not going to... You hear the screams and the obscenities from across the hall of people who are trying to use this as an actual 3D input device. Yeah.

And as a game device, to have something that people are like, oh, wow, that's cool. I can see my hand in there. And then they're immediately distracted by trying to make it do something we're trying to force it to do something because it doesn't quite it almost does yes and then they turn to me and say accusingly it doesn't work yeah and it's your fault right yeah and the oculus to me is is similar although the wow factor is much higher when it works. So it's similar in that it doesn't quite work as well as you want, but it almost does? Yeah, but my feeling is the software is the problem there, not the hardware.

But you may disagree, Sophie. I'm not sure what's going on, but I think... So let's, just for everyone listening, the DK1, the first development kit, I thought for the Oculus worked pretty well. I would plug it into my computer. It was immediately seen by my computer. And it worked, at least as far as integrating

with whatever I put it into. And you had that one, Christopher, but it made you sort of sick. About five minutes and I was ready to quit most of the time. There were some issues with the visual design and the tracking on the Oculus DK1 that meant that your brain and your ears were disconnected a bit. I found a few practiced. Yeah. Yeah. brain and your ears were disconnected a bit and so i found if you practiced yeah yeah

um it did get easier the more you did it but and then the second generation the dk2 came out like uh it's just sort of no it's just sort of shipping in the last few months to to people who ordered it okay um what's different It has a head tracking camera. So instead of just relying on gyros and accelerometers. If you get that problem, it's in computer vision. It's a lot easier. It can tell if you're leaning forward or back or side. And they also changed some of the display hardware so that it's low persistence,

which apparently helps with motion sickness. So you're not getting a funny blur that your brain is not able to interpret and i i did find that the dk2 when it worked um and when i could get stuff to work it was much more comfortable that way and you even let me wear that one and i didn't get cars let you well it wasn't like you forced me no it makes it sound like I'm hoarding it. Well, I mean, with DK1, you were like, yeah, you'll get sick. Oh, yeah. And you were really like, don't barf on my hardware. But with the DK2, you thought it would be pretty cool. And it was pretty neat, except for the body that was mine but not.

Oh, it was just that demo. But I would get sick pretty quickly but I was good for about five minutes. So I think when DK3 comes out, I'll be good. There isn't one. Yeah, I think they're just going to go to consumer. But you don't like DK2, Sophie.

Why not? It has, my model has loose wires in it. So my computer, it's fine if I plug it in and I fiddle with it. I mean, we're talking several hours of fiddling, turning the computer on, off, reinstalling drivers on, off, that kind of thing. Wait a minute, reinstalling the drivers isn't going to help with loose wire.

No, because at the beginning I didn't know what was going on. And so other people on the forums have had the same problem. Well, I didn't have loose wires and I had to reinstall stuff about eight times. Okay. So what they say, that's what the thing is to do. But what I had happened to me after I got it set up at my house

and then I moved it to a mini maker fair yesterday and I took the night before was set up and I couldn't get it going like I just plugged it back in the same way couldn't get it to work it did get it to work and then someone stepped on a wire and then it stopped working again for about an hour. So I'm debating, actually. I might return it. Yeah, I think you should. Well, yeah, that sounds like a manufacturing defect.

Other people have had the same manufacturing defect. It's tough because they're producing this as a development kit. So they're not going for super high quality necessarily. But on the other hand, it is expensive. And loose wire things should be the sort of thing they should fix. Yeah, definitely. I mean, because you want your developers to be able to use your gear. Wow, that would be really infuriating.

Yeah, most of my problems with it have been software. It's very finicky about the display settings. It wants to run at 75 hertz, but if your monitor is not set to 75 hertz, which should have no bearing on it because it's not your monitor, it doesn't work. It's just lots of fiddly stuff that no consumer is going to put up with. And a lack of consistency, where sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, and the cause is cosmic rays. Right. And there's nothing on their site that gives them a spec.

No, even I wouldn't either, not for dev kits like that. But for someone like I have a computer that worked with the DK1, and now I have a tremendous lag with the DK2. And I suspect it's my graphics card, but I don't actually know. I mean, that's something I can find out. I'm going to take it to someone, a gamer's house and test it. But another infuriating thing thing and i think this is probably true chris you probably had this too is that you have to put your computer the monitor is like extended so it's as if you had a second monitor and so you drag your game or whatever into the second monitor and then you're controlling it from inside the goggles. So I'm wearing

the goggles and I'm clicking my mouse around inside the goggles. Yeah, I actually found a way around that. How? It was an extended mode setting. Not extended, direct mode. If you, in the config software, there's a

direct to rift setting. And you can set that. And if the stars are aligned and you give the software you're opening a command line option... And your first port. ...that I think was enable directX 11 or force directX 11. I'm not kidding. Then it worked.

That was some serious food. We should email offline. I was able after, I don't know, about 12 hours of fiddling and uninstalling and so on, I got it to run in direct mode. Although when I unplugged it and restarted it yesterday, I was not able to get it to run in direct mode. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh. But, I mean, as an engineer, you know how they got here, don't you?

Yeah. And it's infuriating. On the other hand, their technology is pretty cool. But it is infuriating. I guess I feel like if you're going to be at home and you're going to run demos and use it to look, that's fine. But if you're going to travel around and show demos, the DK2 is just really finicky. Yeah, or you're trying to seriously build something

based on this technology. And I think that should be their goal in making a development kit of this sophistication is we want people to create experiences that they're going to build companies or products out of, and we want to give them a leg up. And if you can't do that, well, if they don't ever leave their desks,

I mean, Sophie was just saying, if you don't plan on changing anything, then it's reasonably consistent yeah i yeah but you want to go around and you certainly you certainly don't want to release development kits and have multiple versions of it and then have the second one or the third one or the you know the next one be worse in terms of stability than the previous. I feel like the DK2 is worse in terms of stability.

I know, I totally agree. Oh, I didn't realize that. That's actually really nice to hear somebody who's not on a forum saying that. Yeah, we don't participate in forums. Really? I read them. Actually, Chris does. I occasionally participate in forums, but only when I'm infuriated past a maximum

yes I can always tell the furious typing and as you know arguing with people on the internet is extremely effective I haven't found anyone on Oculus no no no not in that forum other forums

yes there's one forum in particular he spends a lot of time on what this is not true these are lies uh but okay so the oculus project and the wobble wobble wobble board yeah wobble world i think i had one wobble. It's called Wobble Wonder. That's the name of the project. Wobble Wonder. So I will just kind of leave this project on a positive note. All of the things that I learned, I plan to put rain into the next one. Actual rain?

Water? Little squirt guns? That'll help with the loose wires. It will. Are you going to use solenoids to shoot the little squirt guns are you gonna use something yes oh that's so cool find me up so yeah i mean i'm still pretty excited about the whole virtual reality thing i'm just not excited about this headset you know and the thing is that my experience with it sort of just at least said to me this is going to work and this is going to be a big thing they have they have a lot of work to do to get there but this is a compelling enough

experience that this is probably really going to happen within the next five years probably and be you know turned into some really, really cool things. But I don't think it's there yet. Yeah, I think another thing that I'm certainly interested in and I hope that this happens sooner than five years is that it becomes easier to do multiplayer. Yeah, that's an interesting question. Because right now, I actually don't play video games at all but i know people can play with each other from different houses or different locations

but everybody has their own computer and then there's a central server so if you're doing demos with multiplayer you're bringing a lot of stuff around right yeah and unity i think has some uh some apis for doing that for adding on kind of networked multiplayer but i haven't tried that they yeah i haven't tried it either they have it uh it's more just the lugging around of computers like extra computers yeah Yeah. Oh, sorry. I was trying to figure out when my CastAR was coming. I'm sure it's coming soon. And you guys just reminded me that it should be soon.

I am super jealous. So CastAR is, it's also unbelievably cool. It's like, it's augmented reality. So you can see everything else around you while you're playing a game. Oh, you have these little holographic things. I'm so, yeah,

I'm jazzed about that. It'd be interesting. It should be interesting to see the contrast. So the complaint that I have about the cast they are, which I don't even have one, although I wouldn't say no to one. Nobody has one, right. And I think as soon as they become available, I will.

I did actually support the Kickstarter, though. So I just didn't buy one. It's the reflective screen that you need to use. Yeah. Yeah, it always seems like. You think that's going to be a problem? I'm painting the house in it. Jesus. Jesus.

This whole room is going to be the retro-reflective stuff. Is it going to be obvious Imaginarium or Drematorium? It is totally going to be my Imaginarium. I think it's really expensive, that stuff. No, they use it... I mean, that's what reflective jackets are and reflective bike lights. But those are all three inches square. Well, yeah, but you can get them for like 50 cents.

All right, I don't know. So I briefly looked into it, and I hope that somebody writes in or says. Crush my dreams with facts. I'm sorry, but I did try the cast they are, and I hope that somebody writes in or says- Crush my dreams with facts. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. But I did try the cast they are, and I had the same idea. I'm like, I'm going to cover a ruminant, and I'm going to make all these creatures and jump around with them or something.

But I think an 8x11 sheet was like $30. 8 inches by 11 inches? So a piece of paper? Mm-hmm. I think an 8x11 sheet was like $30. 8x11? So a piece of paper? That's rather prohibitive if you're going to do your whole room. So let's hope that I'm wrong and somebody contradicts that. Well, it'll go either one or two ways.

It'll become really popular and that stuff will become even more expensive as it becomes scarce or somebody will pump up the volume production of it and it'll become cheaper. According to Rust-Oleum on Amazon,

they make the, there is a can of spray paint, 10 ounces for 13 bucks. Really? Retro-reflective spray paint? It says, I was a little hard on that too, but yeah. Well. We'll see.

It will be cool. But yes, the CastAR, sorry, I totally lost my, let me click all these tabs closed. It'll be better. Wait, when is yours coming? Oh, not till next year. Yeah, when they finish them. I don't think they've said when they're planning to show. We did the Kickstarter, and we didn't get the early version.

But that one has some advantages because, like you said, you can still see the world around you, so it's not going to be causing the motion sickness kinds of artifacts. I do think they had some add-on, though, to make it full VR. They do, yes. So we'll see what that's like. Huh, that's cool. And it also has the advantage of being a lot lighter.

Yes. Yeah, that's the other thing about the Oculus, is you feel like you're wearing something, a big helmet. And then with all the wires although the dk2 seems to have reduced that i didn't plug in the positional tracker i mean i have and i've gotten it to work but i haven't been demoing it yeah i found that added a lot but it is another thing you have to place. And that's finicky, too, because your position, it can lose you. So you have to be in the right spot in front of it.

Yeah, it's just a lot of moving parts. And you have to make it do the blue light, and it often doesn't do the blue light when you unplug it and plug it back in. Software. Damn software engineers. Okay, so that's a really cool project. And VR is someday, someday. It's right there with Fusion.

Oh, man. 50 years. 50 years. From every year. You've worked on a lot of other really nifty projects. There was the training of the goldfish, which I thought about asking if you could help train my dogs. But what else has been really cool that you've worked on that you want to talk about?

Goldfish training? That would be... Well, we could talk about that, but... Goldfish training? To, like, get your slippers or something? Goldfish fetch my slippers i don't think so i think it would die you can't fetch slippers with goldfish i don't i don't know maybe it's got a little bowl that it drives around you think actually there was one of those and it

was super cool that was really cool so it does turn out that goldfish can be trained. And so that was, I work a lot with my brother, who's a neuroscientist, and he trains mice. He's a behavioral scientist. And he had me make something to help train the mice, which was basically a beam break circuit that sent a signal. So beam break sends a signal, provides reward. And then he started talking to me about doing the same thing for the goldfish. So I made that thing. And that was actually pretty interesting because an infrared LED doesn't travel very far in water.

So there was a lot of experimentation with how far could we get the beam break to work. And we got about two inches apart. So basically, the goldfish swims through the hoop, triggering a feeder, an automated feeder, and the fish gets fed. And the fish learns remarkably fast within a few hours that if it swims through the hoop, it will get fed to the point where after the next second day, I'm like, all right, let's make the delay five hours. Okay, let's make it eight hours. Let's make it a whole day. And then the other side thing that came out, there were two goldfish, and one goldfish just waited for the other one

to swim through the hoop and then ran over or swam over and ate all the food. That's the smart goldfish. That was the smart goldfish. Nobel Prize winning goldfish. That was the smart goldfish. Nobel Prize winning goldfish. So, yes. Let's talk about, or can we talk about Blue Stamp Engineering? Yes, that's the high school engineering program.

I did want to ask you about that. So, yeah, you are involved with doing classes, helping them show stuff? Yes, I helped put together some projects, which is, there are projects really that are from all around the internet. Well, let me start by saying Blue Stamp Engineering is a six-week summer program for high school students. So they are age 13 to about 18. And it's a hands-on building engineering program.

And it's typically mechanical software or electrical engineering is what the students are interested in. So I go around to high schools all over New York and evangelize about being an engineer. I tell them about the program, but it's more fun to go there and bring some blinky things or I'll bring the Oculus or bring whatever and tell them about how these things get made and tell them that if they go to college for this or if they learn to do this specialized skill they can build their own oculus or work for a company like any kind of company control systems or whatever

they want to talk about i didn't understand what being an engineer was when I was definitely middle school. Even into my junior year of high school, I didn't really understand. So having somebody say, this is what I do, I build things, and it's really fun, would be great. And there in, let's see, New York, which is where you're based,

Houston, Denver, and San Francisco, it looks like. Yeah. Do you mostly hang out with the New York folks, or you've been traveling around with them? Oh, no, I don't travel around. I'm in New York only. Still. Although the founders, Dave and Robin, I guess I've probably seen them in other cities. Wait a minute. I've probably seen them in other cities. Wait a minute.

I've known them for a few years. Junior in high school is building an EKG heart rate monitor? Exactly. That is cool. And what's really amazing is some of these kids have no experience in engineering to begin with. That can be good because you don't know what you don't, what you can't do sometimes. And so you try it anyway, it works. Exactly.

So last year I met all, I interviewed all of the kids to decide if they were going to be accepted into the program. And really the main thing that I was looking for was to see that they were going to be tenacious about it. Like, was the probability pretty high that they were going to finish a project? Engineering does require some stubbornness. It does. And some motivation, too.

Although most of them, I don't think I met any of any students, high school students who are unmotivated. And so what else do you do with them, I don't think I met any of any students, high school students who are unmotivated. And so what else do you do with them? I mean. So I'll go to a high school and chat with them. So it's like a career day, but just me. And we'll talk about what it's like to be an engineer they'll ask typically once they get going they'll start asking a lot of questions about what kinds of projects that they might be able to work on when they get done with school something i hear a lot is a lot of the kids want to do things that link hard science and engineering

so they'll be like i'm really interested in biology. How can I link that with engineering? And what Bluestamp will do is for someone like that, or if there's a group of them, they'll have speakers come in a couple times a week and they'll find someone who's a biomedical engineer who will come in and talk to the students throughout the six weeks. And that gets really tricky because now you're talking about things beyond engineering. You have to at least get some working skill level in a couple of disciplines to integrate, for example, biology and embedded systems or something like that. But I think that's important because when I list my random things I've worked on, it's always other fields. It's like I'm applying this super cool field to embedded systems.

Sure, sure. And I love that. I love learning about all the other fields. That's really important. It's just at a high school level, that's... That is true. At a high school level, it is a bit much. The challenge is a little higher. That's really cool. But I also, I agree with what you said, Chris, about if they don't, they don't know. They don't know that this stuff is hard.

So I'll talk to them as a group. And then when I'm, if they decide to apply to the program, I'll talk to them individually. And that'll also be a lot of kind of teasing out of them what kind of project they want to work on and helping them to understand that no in six weeks you're not going to build a robot that can traverse sand and i don't know do all these many things but let's pick something that can traverse sand and maybe just do three out of the seven things you just listed. Yeah, and that's where experienced people can help and say, this is what's feasible in your timeframe.

Yeah, I mean, I will never tell someone that what they want to do is impossible. I'm definitely like, okay, yeah, you could do that, but we need to make it a little less big. Let's just put some milestones in here. Let's do part of that first, and then we can... Then we can finish it. Yeah.

So yeah, I find doing that really rewarding, and I feel like all of us engineers would find that rewarding to go and talk to young people about what we do. Yes, when I do, it's incredibly rewarding. It reminds me all the reasons that I get through the parts that I don't enjoy as much. It just really revitalizes my love for engineering. Seeing someone else excited about stuff that you may have become jaded about is helpful jaded cynical bored yes we can't i mean we see all this stuff all the time things like the oculus rift to go back to that for just a second and the leap you know you show that to ayear-old who's never seen anything like that before,

and who cares how badly it works? They're going to be excited. I'm looking forward to showing it to your father the next time we see him. Yeah. My mother just tried it on yesterday. So that was pretty cool. I mean, and then also with something like the Oculus, talking to them about what an accelerometer is,

what a gyroscope is, like really making it pretty technical so they feel like they're i mean oculus actually puts a lot of stuff on their website that's really helpful to explain to other people how it works yeah things like that are a doorway to hear all these parts that you can make something out of here's what they do They're a doorway to spark fun and eat a fruit. Right. So four of the students from last summer, I ran into them at the New York City Maker Faire, actually in waiting to use my project, which was really cool. And they told me they were making a thermoelectric lighter,

like a fire starter so i haven't followed or i haven't seen what the project is they don't have a website but i thought it was really cool that these four high school students from different high schools in new york so i mean from staten island to manhattan can be an hour so not really, like, they're not close together. Right. But these four students got together and made a sort of, I wouldn't call it a company, but a group. Well, and they're probably doing it a better way than I've done it, which is by lighting electronics on fire by accident.

Yeah, I can make a thermal electric fire starter really quickly. Hang on. I've got a battery over here. So, but all four of those students, when I first met them a year ago, I think only one of them really had done any building of anything before. And now they've built this, and they're building, if not a company, then a group. I mean, they're 15. That's so cool.

It's like really, really cool. And I felt that was maybe one of the best things for me about New York Maker Faire was seeing them. Now, are these kids at normal public schools? Some of them are. Okay. I'm just curious because it seems to me, and you don't know firsthand, but a lot of reading, there's a movement to kind of standardize what school curriculum is. And it feels like there's sort of a little bit of quashing of creative spark, and this goes against that a lot.

So I was curious, were these public school students or private school students or charter schools? That sounds like it's a mix. Yeah, it's a mix. Actually, Blue Stamp really reaches out to make the student body, the summer student body, to be really diverse in all things. And they do have need-based financial aid on their website pretty clearly, so that's kind of cool. Yeah, we give out quite a lot of it.

Yay. Yay. Yeah, which, you know, I think that that is a really good way to remove a barrier to someone who might just be like, oh, well, I can just skate and say I don't have money to push myself this summer. No excuses. Yeah. So you do that. And I believe you've said you do like 80% technical engineering sorts and 20% working on your own projects.

Yeah. And then you do that and you write. You have a blog. I do. It's about quitting your day job. And you've been an evangelist for quitting the nine to five for a long time i mean that's not you know you it's on element 14 now but you had it even before it was located there i did i had a super green dot blog for about a year before it moved why why why are

you trying to talk everybody out of having a job what do you want what kind of anarchy are you creating um i seem to since i stopped working full-time at at one company i seem to have met a lot of people who have pretty cool jobs at one company. But that hadn't been my experience before. I mean, I would go work at a company, and you would only get maybe two weeks of vacation and usually split up one week and one week, or that was my experience, at, let's say, seven companies in six years, something like that. Everybody who was older and more experienced was mad.

So there wasn't a joyful feeling. I'm a very joyful person. So that pissed everybody off. So overall, although I made a lot of good friends and connections from all of my regular jobs, I don't think I ever really had a great experience. And I think that having a job that you are doing just for the money really does kill your creativity. Boy, am I glad I started at HP. Really? Well, yeah. I was just thinking, this sounds familiar. It wasn't that great, but I did get pushed over to the labs and the bioscience pretty quickly. And that was something that was incredibly satisfying.

And I met people I liked and people who loved their jobs and had loved their jobs for 20 years. That's great. And so since then I've met plenty of people who are just picking up the paychecks. And maybe they're puzzled and amused for a few hours a week, but overall the average is just phoning it in. And I don't like to work with those people. Well, in my experience, which I kind of feel is similar to Sophie's, but I do remember there were periods of, say, three to six months at each of the full-time jobs I worked, which were really cool.

The honeymoon? It was either the beginning of a startup or the beginning of a product, something like that, where everybody's working together on a common goal. There's a design, there's stuff going on, not a lot of overhead because we haven't shipped anything yet, that kind of thing. So, you know you're working on the second version or you're just in maintenance, it's a nightmare. And the couple of jobs I worked, that was all it was from the start. And that, yeah, I totally agree. That's not a way to encourage your creative instincts. No.

And being bored every day. I mean, at some point i just thought if this is what being an engineer is i'm actually not going to do this anymore well then you you didn't start out as an engineer straight out of college you were an english major um i got it i got a degree in english yes and then about then about, I don't know, seven years later, I got an electrical engineering degree. That's not a normal path. No, that's a little twisty. That's great.

How did that come about? I was actually doing a sculpture degree, but my parents wanted me to have an English. They wanted something different. So it was easy, pretty easy to get an English degree from cobbling together all the classes. They thought you should get something that you could market. Actually, they wanted

me to go into science, but I was very resistant. I actually worked in movies and television as a special effects person, props, custom props, like fabricator. Okay, that's cool.

A severed hand that I might have seen on TV might have been sculpted by you. Might have been, yes. I made a lot of severed hands. Not everybody gets to say that. I also got to make a lot of animatronics. Well, no, back to that. I mean, the animatronics well no back to that I mean the animatronics is really cool and we should talk about that but I've made a lot of severed hands

and have never been you know incarcerated for long periods is probably as long as I start out severed I think it's okay right right and so and then you went into animatronics before or after you got the electrical engineering degree before okay so this explains right and then i thought i would like to make my own receivers and transmitters and like the high school students i didn't know it was hard

because i hadn't ever met anything that was hard because I had never taken any science or math classes. So I just had no idea. I was like, oh, well, I'm using all these things off the shelf. Maybe I would like to make my own. So I'll just go to school for that. Did you retain the it's not hard, or did you sit through freshman physics and get whapped upside the head with equations that were just impenetrable? I can say that getting that degree is the hardest thing I have ever done in my life. And there you have it.

Electrical engineers are smarter than English majors. Wait, what? That's impossible. She's both. She can't be smarter than herself. Right. Okay. Electrical engineering is harder than English. Electrical engineering is just hard. Yes. And here and there, I'll meet someone who's right out of school who's like, oh, that was super easy. I'm like, really?

Yeah, we knew some of those folks. Yeah. But where are they now? They don't have a podcast. That's because they're too busy spending, buying yachts or something. You were a hacker in residence at SparkFun, and that was post-EE degree. That was just last year. Right.

I should have put that in my notes. What was that like? You went to Colorado, hung out with them, and got to take whatever off the shelves you wanted? Because how did you get that gig? It's not thief in residence. Are you sure? It's not. Really? game? It's not Thief in Residence. Are you sure? It's not. Really? Although they did, they were awfully nice to me.

They did give me a lot of things. I was in the second, I think I was the second hacker in residence. And by the time I left, they actually have a formal program. So I highly recommend the program. People should apply. You choose a project, you propose it, and they bring you there for, I think they're saying two to four weeks. I went for two weeks. I would do it again. I built a, I went out there to evaluate the NeuroSky MindWave brainwave headset. That sounds like another one of those things.

Oh, my God. So, yeah, I built a board that just basically had a Bluetooth module on it, like a homebrew Arduino with a Bluetooth, and someone there who is a lead developer at Scratch and he helped to write the software to parse all the data coming out of the headset and we determined that the headset is really a lot of BS. And how long?

No, no. Sadly, the Hacker in in residence program is discontinued so there's no need for future applications I wonder why yes well I mean maybe I will talk to SparkFun get them to come on the show give us some coupons and explain themselves

yeah they also just moved to a big builder yes a spark fund to get them to come on the show, give us some coupons, and explain themselves. Yeah. I'm sure they'll want to come on the show. They also just moved to a big builder. Yes. So that might be why. They have a lot of things going on. Yeah. And they did get that bus that they drive around, so there might be some conflict.

They got a bus that they're, an education bus? Yeah. Oh, cool. And for a while you could ask for the bus to come to your school and all that. And I'm not sure exactly what's going on with that, but it was pretty neat. Yeah. SparkFun remains one of my favorite places. If SparkFun and or Adafruit had Amazon Prime shipping, we'd be in a lot of trouble.

That is true. I don't think there's any danger of that. I'm kind of surprised that somebody, I don't know. Well, they're probably not interested in losing money as much as Amazon is. Well, at least DigiKey should offer some sort of prime shipping. I think that Adafruit offers free shipping. I think both of them do. Adafruit and SparkFun offer free shipping for orders over a certain amount.

Yeah, for SparkFun it's $75, but I think for Adafruit it's even more, which explains why I got that LCD I was talking about, Christopher. Sorry. You just had to because otherwise shipping would have cost $3. So it made sense to buy a $70 display. Well, he had $5 in batteries, so yeah. Yeah, if I need something pretty fat, I mean, Adafruit is right in New York.

But at this point, I'm choosing the company that I buy from based on where I get the tutorial from. And that seems fair. I mean, you do some writing, and I definitely am using these tutorials. So if I get it from SparkFun or Adafruit, that is where I tend to buy that piece. Right. Yeah. I feel like that's a, yeah, that's, that's a non, I don't know, non-choosy way to choose. Well, and they do, while they have a lot of overlap, they actually have not as much overlap as it might seem i mean spark friend has the accelerometer i wanted but adafruit had it in a five volt tolerant package so yeah you have to choose yeah and i've only recently well since i went to spark fun i i was really just in rolling all my own boards

doing everything from scratch and then when I went to SparkFun I was like oh you guys have wires that like just hook in really easily those jumper wires I've never used those before really well now I own tons of them now I think maybe because

I'm a software engineer who's always been a little hesitant doing much with the hardware. And I can't roll my own boards. I actually don't really know how to make a board until I take Chris's class. You're teaching a class? No, Chris Gamble's Contextual Electronics. I keep meaning to watch the videos any day now.

You should just take the class. I actually want to take his class too, because I think there's something I can learn about layout. Yeah. There's a lot I could learn about layout. Yeah, I mean, there's probably a lot I could learn about layout. All of it. Well, I mean, you know, a little bit.

You know what the word means. I do. And I know a few people I can contract to do it for me. Why do you need to learn it? And I know that one's really good at RF and this one's really good at making miniature things, lots of layers. And yeah,

it's, I'm so in the buy it mode, but I would like to make it. You don't have to know how to do things if you just know people who do. It gets expensive. My husband does all my mechanical work. My, all my mechanical work. All the mechanical design and layout and everything.

That'd be cool. I'm sorry we're in the same field. Maybe my Chris should take Chris Gamble's class. It'd be so much easier for me. Sure. I'll just go get an electrical engineering degree so I can do your electrical work for you. Oh, back to Sophie. What are you doing?

Is there a project you can tell us about you're working on lately? Are you starting something new after kind of finishing Wobble? I think what I can tell you uh work wise i just finished a project with a i'll just talk about it quickly nordic nordic rf chip system on a chip i never used one of those before has a bluetooth low energy and a microprocessor all in this little tiny package with a bunch of passives. It's kind of amazing.

So there's that. And shout out to Jen. Yes. Shout out to Jen. Yeah. Because she answered like seven emails of mine. I mean, I was given a very short period of time to make this thing work. And I was like, oh, my God, I barely even know what Bluetooth low energy is.

And they were like, oh, don't worry about it. We'll give you the stack. Yeah. Okay. That doesn't quite work. You know, you still have to set it up and the whole attributes and the blob. Right. But again, I didn't know anything about it, so I wasn't scared.

Yeah. And luckily, Jen answered all of my emails. And yeah. I think next up, what I would like to work on is making sneakers for virtual reality. So there's some accelerometers, sneakers made by Nike. Kind of have some ideas to use those to walk through a world. Eventually, you'll run out of room. That's always the problem, right?

I mean, well, you mean... Are you just going to walk in place? Walk in place. Yeah. Yeah, okay. You could walk on a hamster ball. That's... On rollers. There's actually stairs at my gym

that go up and up and up. Not like a Stairmaster, but in actual stairs. Like an escalator? Kind of, yes. And I was thinking that would be cool. Well, they had that in Ready Player One where they had roller balls that would go in any direction so that when you were in VR you could actually move. Right, right. I thought that was cool.

Yeah, I'm sure that'll work just as well as all the other things. I'm getting depressed. It's coming. Five years, five years. Everything's five years away. Well, there is that one product called Milo. Oh, I forgot what it's called. It is something like a treadmill, a slippy treadmill.

You wear slippy shoes and you walk inside of a container thing and you walk in a VR world. I'm sorry. I would totally have called it hamster ball. Okay, well, speaking of five years and maybe 15, what do you think you'll be designing in 15 years or in five? I don't know what I think is realistic. I would really like to have my own theme park. Okay.

All of these. So planned. Yeah, with all of these experiences and other people's experiences. A virtual theme park or a real theme park? No, a real theme park. I mean, maybe there would be virtual experiences in the theme park or a real theme park? No, a real theme park. I mean, maybe there would be virtual experiences in the theme park. But with all of these interaction projects, I think it would be really cool to have a park to put all of these things in. Is this like a permanent Maker Faire?

Because I'm ready for one of those. Kind of, yeah. You went to a little mini Maker Faire yesterday. What was that like? So the difference that I can tell between mini and big is mini, it's all people making stuff as opposed to the bigger ones that has a trade show sort of component. So everybody who went was not only audience, they were also maker. More like everyone exhibiting was a maker and not a company.

I think this shows that I haven't been to the Maker Faire in a year or two. No, there's lots of big booths and stuff. I guess so, there were. The regular Maker Faire, yeah. Yeah, I guess I did wander around the O'Reilly booth and think, where's my book? Yeah. Well, that's cool. But was it huge and crowded it wasn't um it was in kipsy new york

and i think they said that there were 50 something exhibitors and they had sold in advance about 350 tickets so maybe there were 600 people there so no I was really crowded because the oculus yeah I could see that yeah everybody wants to try the oculus but it wasn't insanely crowded on both sides of me though I had quadcopters on one side and this is a cool project um they had set up hoops to go through like basketball not basketball hoops but hoops in the air so you were flying the quadcopters through the hoops and I thought that was awesome and should have had fire but anyway that was pretty cool next next version the hoops should have had fire the hoops should have had fire. That's pretty cool.

No, and on the other side of me was a local model airplane club, so I was surrounded by flying things, which was awesome. That's something else I want to do with VR, is put it on a plane. An RC plane. You want to become a little bug and try to fly?

No, but first person. Do you fly? I used to. Well, little radio control planes, not real planes. But I kind of got excited about the first person camera-based stuff that people have started doing. Yeah.

Now they want to call them drones, but they're just RC planes. Yeah, I think that stuff's pretty cool too. My husband is nuts for flying remote control helicopters and building them and so on. Yeah, I always tell you, away from helicopters, that seemed too hard. I don't think he knows any different. That's the flying thing that he uses.

So you've also been to the Big Bay Area Maker Faire and to the New York Maker Faire, as well as this mini, and probably a number of other mini ones. Nope, that's it. That was my first mini. Oh, okay. Yeah. What is the difference? I mean, is the Bay Area one and New York, are they pretty similar because they're put on by the same people

or are they just so vastly different in tone? Oh, I think they're really different in tone. And I would also say that if you're there as an exhibitor, I've only been an exhibitor at those two. It's, depending on the exhibit you have, it's a different experience. The first time I was out in Bay Area was my first Maker Faire, and I had radiation detectors, these art projects made with radiation detectors. And I met so many radiation specialists and scientists that work in radiation. And so that was a different experience than exhibiting an Oculus project in New York, where it was a whole line of consumers.

Yes, yes. Those would be two totally different audiences. And yet, if you swapped them, you might get the same experience. I mean, putting an Oculus Rift out here, people still line up for it. Right. And if people who are lining up for it, just because of, I don't know, statistically, most people are, they want to play with it. They don't want to develop it for it. So in New York, I had an interesting experience where I was pretty much only talking to people who were not makers at all in any way, not coders, not makers, not only interested in where can I buy this game. So at the Mini Maker Faire, this time I kind of headed all of that off by before anyone

even put the thing on, I started talking about how you could code for it and how it works and you know all that kind of stuff to try to make people understand that it isn't something you just buy or the thing that we made, me and the team that I worked with, we didn't just buy it. Yeah. It's so strange that the Maker Faire has become that kind of audience in the big ones. The earlier ones, it didn't seem that way.

They used to go to Sharper Image. Now you just go to the Maker Faire. Right? Yes. I think my husband's head had just exploded. I remember Sharper Image. I loved that. That was the best.

That's where bad gadget ideas go to die. Oh, I was crazy about that store. I used to go there a lot. That and Brookstone. Brookstone still exists. Really? Yeah, actually. And then you don't fly, but

I should have brought you the in-flight magazine when I went to Vegas. Why would that exist? I sent you the picture of the submarine coming out of the water. It was a whole magazine full of, or a whole magazine full of,

or a whole catalog full of interesting gadgets. You mean the SkyMall? The SkyMall. Is it because people are oxygen deprived in airplanes? Therefore, they're not going to exercise good judgment? Southwest was giving out free drinks, so it all looked pretty good. The SkyMall is pretty cool and it's actually pretty

easy to get your thing in the sky mall just you know in case any listeners i have so many ideas that follow that now like just how easy is it it's pretty easy you send them an email they send you something back no i want to um the the only thing that is not so great is that they don't manufacture for you well that's so they're basically like amazon still still you deprived. You can take advantage of thousands of impaired customers. Yeah. I can't remember what the percentage is, but it's pretty high also, higher than Amazon. Well, yeah, because it's a very niche market. Yes.

Okay. Yeah, because it's a very niche market. Yes. So I actually contacted them about a product I had, and they were pretty quick to respond and discuss. And the thing about the manufacturing, that they don't do that or help with that or any of that, was, for me, it wasn't going to work out. How to advertise your products in SkyMall. That will be in the show notes for those of you who have these ideas and really want to act on them.

Christopher, I think I'm about out of questions. Do you have anything left to ask? I'm sure we could rant about the missed promise of various technology products, but we've probably done them all to death. Yeah, it's Christopher's snack time. Sophie, do you

have any last thoughts you'd like to leave us with? No, no, I think I'm good. Well, you're welcome to come back anytime. Thank you. That was pretty fun. Good.

Thank you very much for chatting with us. Thanks, Sophie. All right. Have a good night. My guest has been Sophie Kravitz, owner, operator, engineer

at Mix Engineering and author of the Quit Your Day Job blog series. Thank you to Christopher as well 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. And we do need iTunes reviews or just those stars. As many stars as you can give us would be lovely. Please. It helps. Thanks.

One final thought for you. In this one from a man I think we all kind of have a little crush on. What? Elon Musk. The founder of Tesla Motors and SpaceX had something important to say. He said, if something is important enough, even if the odds are against you, you should still do it. Come on, you totally have a crush on him.

Bye. Bye.