Embedded - 81: Two of Those People Can't Be Ducks

Episode Date: December 17, 2014

Chris and Elecia babble up a show about gifts, conferences, and makers. Embedded Systems Conference is put on by UBM. The conference is in Boston May 6-7, 2015, Santa Clara July 20-22, and Minneapolis November 4-5. The Santa Clara proposal deadline is January 9th. O'Reilly's Solid Conference is June 22-25 in San Francisco. Proposals are due January 12th. Fitbit Surge (Amazon) Kerbal Space Program and some controllers and telemetry boards from other people CrossyRoad is on iOS and Android (This is bad, do not start. Also unihorse is the best!) Elecia's Wordy project on Hackaday Magnetoception in humans is controversial (wiki) but the magnetometer/motor anklet is neat.

This is Embedded, the show for people who love gadgets. I'm Alesia White, alongside Christopher White. We don't really know what we're going to talk about today. Let's find out. I'm going to talk about whales. Whales. Actually, I'm not going to talk about whales. I'm slightly disappointed.

So, any good geeky gift ideas ideas why are you doing this to me i just told you before the show that i hadn't done this part i know and then our internet's been down for a couple of days so we're like searching on our phones for things but you did send a gift to your dad which was pretty cool cool. Although, Ed, if you're listening, fast forward like twice. So we'll talk about it for like a minute. Well, I mean, I don't know if it's a good gift for everybody. And I don't think it's exactly fair since I have a vested interest in it. But the product I've been working on for thousands and thousands of years

actually shipped accidentally or something. No, it's the Fitbit Surge, which is their new super watch, I guess they're calling it. And it does GPS tracking and heart rate tracking and all kinds of exercise-y things, as well as notifications and stuff from your phone. So it's a pretty neat device. This is the first time you've had a device that is sold at stores.

Yes, this is the first time I've been able to see something that I made on Amazon, for example. Yeah, don't read the reviews. Although I haven't looked at them. They're actually fine. There was one one-star review, and then a bunch of people attacked that person. So you know i felt pretty good about that that's nice um but you know it's been a long project and it's the first consumer product i've worked on so it's been kind of a

learning experience for me i obviously i didn't do everything i you know was a part of a big team so um that you know gives me plausible deniability for when anything goes wrong with it in the field. That's the reason you mentioned the team. Other person's code. Yeah, I had nothing to do with that. Although I did have a lot to do with the UI and graphics stuff, and that's where people tend to notice that something's wrong. So yeah, I sent in one of those just for laughs, so he could have something I built. Because most of the things I built are either giant routers

that nobody ever sees unless they're on fire, or medical devices nobody wants to see, or a smattering of things that never shipped. So, I think it's pretty cool. I'm also a little glad they're difficult to get, because I remember the first Christmas after I worked at LeapFrog asking you if you wanted to go to Target. And it was solely on the pretense that I could go visit my toys in the shelves. We haven't done that yet.

We tried to find it at REI, but it wasn't quite out yet. Well, they had a bad display mock-up, but it wasn't quite the same. But going to Target was always fun because you spy on people, right, who are standing in the shelves and seeing what they were saying, or worse, change the toy into demo mode. No, I never did that. Oh. Maybe it was just the Easter eggs.

We didn't put any Easter eggs in this thing. I'm really disappointed. And some people who are probably going to listen to this or maybe not were very excited about that and almost yelled at me when I suggested that we should have put some in. Easter eggs are fun. I mean, if you've got the space for them, it's worth it to have a little bit of character.

Yeah, well, it's got some app infrastructure so maybe someday maybe someday all right so we didn't do our homework to look for geeky gifts i did get the chiptronics yeah that looks pretty cool so what's my birthday so that was kind of What is that about? The idea is that you can use copper tape and conductive adhesive and these little stickers that are LEDs. And they have this little drawing pad. And you make like a starry sky and you actually make the lights, the stars light up. But you also draw it in order for it to look pretty. And so it's a basic, here's an introduction to electronics with a crafting artistic bend. So is it designed for making wearable stuff or just easy to put things together?

It's designed for making a journal. A journal, okay. A journal, yeah, a journal more than anything. So it's more for like drawing things and having them connected with things you draw. Yeah, actually. It's a strange concept, so I'm having trouble getting around it. But they had how to build a pressure sensor.

Okay. And they had how to build a pressure sensor. Okay. And they had how to build switches that you could trigger multiple or different, and you could light up lights based on which switch you did. And so you could make nearly a little keyboard, you know, like the Tom Hanks in Toy Story. For ants. Yes. I mean, it's all finger-based. Right.

But you could make one. one okay and it wouldn't be you don't have to solder you don't have to get dirty you can do this in a quiet corner by yourself and learn a little bit and they had some electronics not a lot this was the intro kit do you know what you're going to do with it? Do you have any ideas? No, I had a bunch of things out this morning. I have some other projects I sort of got going on in my background. I noticed that. There was a lot of blinking. Is it still blinking?

Oh, yes, it is. Sorry. How did you not notice that it was still blinking? It was behind my computer. You know that lights are blinking behind you. I know. No, that one, and Jen gave me, actually Jen gave me that. Jen also gave me a wearables EnnioMagic that was all LEDs

and a little tiny controller that gets flash blinked from the interwebs, which is just crazy. And that was another. LEDs. And I'm amused by LEDs, but now I want more than just, here's how to hook up an LED, here's how to hook up a switch. I want to do more with it. All right. Which, I guess, is the good segue into the project I did while I was off last month, which was Wordy.

I'm not done with GIFs. Oh, you're not? Oh, what else? You said you didn't have any LEDs. I know, but as you were talking, I was not done with GIFs. Oh, you're not? Oh, what else? You said you didn't have any. I know, but as you were talking, I was thinking. Okay, go ahead. And this segues into my project, so we'll have dueling segues.

Well, then I'm going to go with the GIFs. Which actually makes me think of people joust on segues. That would be great. The first one is related to my project, and it is a computer game. Why does that not shock me? And it is an educational computer game is this but don't i'm i'm sorry i'm i'm sorry no i'm super excited maybe i should rephrase that is this kerbal i'm done i'm sorry

the game in question is called Kerbal Space Program, and it is a lovely game. It's hard to go on. It's a lovely game wherein you run your own space program, and that includes training astronauts, designing rockets, launching rockets, orbiting, docking, making landings on moons and other planets, exploring the solar system for science that you can spend on new rockets.

And all of it is really, I want to say it's very realistic, except that kind of makes it sound boring. The physics and everything of launching the rockets and controlling them is all really quite realistic. So you actually have to learn a little bit of orbital mechanics, but kind of not rote orbital mechanics. You kind of learn by doing. You don't have to do the math.

No, you don't have to do the math. You can, but there's a lot of... Maybe you have fewer regions. There's a lot of tools within it that allow you to kind of plan things without doing the math, and you can trial and error. But it's super fun, and the little people in it are these little green men, and they tend to die because space programs tend to be dangerous. Especially people who are not doing the math. It's one of those games that you could spend your entire life on. And I have. And it's really good for kids.

But it's not new. I mean, it's been out for a while. So it's on early access. It hasn't really been quite released. It's now in beta, but it's been in alpha for a long time. You've been playing it for a really long time. Well, they gave early access while they were still developing it. They've added a huge amount of stuff to it in recent months that make

it more of a full game where you get contracts to do stuff. It says, oh, go land on the moon or launch our satellite. Then they pay you for that and you can buy new rockets. They've kind of put in a mechanic to keep you going and give you ideas when you might be out of ideas

and not just wanting to be in a sandbox. It's a great game and I recommend it for all techie people and their children and how old do you think you have to be to play the game i think you could i think kids would do okay uh 10 and up probably yeah chiptronics with the sticker books that was it i could see maybe seven to ten getting it and ten and above being able to do it by themselves it's one of those things where it's it's what you put into it so you know there's no winning it's kind of like minecraft you build what you want and you do what you want and you know you set your own goals so you know maybe a younger gets into orbit, and that's their big goal. Maybe an older kid in a couple years gets to the moon.

So you can kind of grow with your sophistication. But it's a cool game, and it's unlike a lot of games that have come out in a long time because it's not competitive. Is there a collaborative mode? And yet you feel a sense of accomplishment. There is not a collaborative mode, exactly. I think they're working on one, but it's a little tricky with the physics engine

to have multiple people's things orbiting. Time basis. Yeah. Because they have time skip for all the boring parts where you're, like, flying millions of miles. So one person couldn't time skip while someone else did. Yeah. It's a little tricky.

All right, that's my pitch for Kerbal Space Program, my plug. Well, but it goes beyond that. This is the point at which, actually, before we get there, when I went to go visit former clients, current clients who I'm not working for. I don't know. But clients. Ex-clients. I went to go pick up my keyboard and whatnot.

And I was wearing my new little Hackaday thing, which we'll talk about. And I said something about this being the first time Chris had gotten a SparkFun box or something. And the intern from last summer, who was still there, boggling, said, so do you guys just go to the shop as soon as you finish working? And it's funny, that comment has really kind of led me in different directions. But if anybody out there wonders, no, Chris and I don't tend to do a lot of projects on the side. We work, and that's enough.

I mean, we do the podcast, which is nominally advertising for our company, but we try not to be too obnoxious about that. Especially since you haven't even mentioned the company's name. Moving on. It's logical elegance. I didn't mean for you to do that. You said we needed ads.

I have enough work. Oh, yeah, I know. You have enough work. I don't, but I will soon. Provide our own ads. Oh. What? Anyway.

Chris is doing his first project. My first project? It's not my first project. It's my first project in a while. Yeah, but this is the one that may have open source components. Have you freed your code before? No. I'm not going to give this to anybody.

Why would I do that? Because look at how much you've used from other people. But nobody's... It's purpose-built. There's 15 of these things out there already. We haven't even talked about what it is. Yeah, maybe we should start there. But I do want to also talk about that whole maker aesthetic.

But let's go on with your Kerbal Space Program... Controller board. Controller board. Controller and telemetry board. Telemetry. So Kerbal has plugins. It's based on Unity. Which is the 3D game engine Sophie talked about.

Right. And that is a big plugin architecture. So people make a lot of mods for it, just like they do for Minecraft or a bunch of other games. And some of the mods allow you to expose data from within the program, and they have one that exposes it over an internet socket. So you can either go to it with a web browser

and it'll give you graphs and things of your rocket's flight and altitude and your orbital parameters and all that kind of stuff. Or, and this is what I'm doing, you can actually hook up to it with some real hardware and get dials and indicator displays. So you have kind of a mission control panel in front of you with all this stuff and switches, you know, physical switches and buttons to launch. And big switches. launch and big switches and the one with the little big switches with the missile cover yeah yeah all that great stuff um just for fun and the reason i was doing it not was not so much that

i wanted it desperately for the game because the game works fine with a keyboard but it is fun and it gave me an excuse to kind of play with some of these things that genuinely i don't care about that much outside of work a lot of times so it was nice to say oh you know this is this would be fun for me and it allows me to play with the microcontroller pick one do some you know various not sensors so, but talk to some displays over I2C. And just, you know, do stuff that I don't generally do in my personal life. Electronics with the FETs and everything. Right. And, you know, doing some minor electronics and learning a little bit about that.

Just to change voltages between some of the displays and that kind of thing. We went to Halted and we wandered around and got the big buttons. And you got a VFD, a vacuum display. Yeah, a vacuum fluorescent display that they had in a bin. And it was much cheaper than if you'd actually bought one, and it worked, which was kind of miraculous. Yeah, although I did notice scorch marks on it later, but it still works.

I don't know if they were there when I got it or not. This should not be a problem at all. Not at all. But you've also gotten code offline because this isn't a product it's okay to just look around and see what else everybody has done yeah but i didn't end up using any of that oh really no i'm using the plugin which is open source uh that goes into kerbal and i'm using the embed um framework from embed yes um i think i'm using the lpc 1768 is the board um which is a nice little uh breadboard compatible dev board and it's got ethernet on it which is really cool

most of those boards do not have any networking at all so that's kind of a cool advantage and so i can just plug it into my computer without messing around with serial, or I could plug it into my router or anywhere in the house and have a separate console without having it tied to the computer. And then they have a lot of pretty good framework of software for all the ports and things. And an RTOS. The embed folks.

Yeah, the embed folks. And it has an RTOS, which is quite usable. And the online compiler, which is free if you buy the board. Yeah, the embed folks. It has an RTOS, which is quite usable. And the online compiler, which is free if you buy the board. Yeah, yeah. It's nice. I heard you yelling about IAR again this morning, so you can't just say it's nice. It's a low bar.

It is pretty low bar. It's a low bar. But, no, it's nice. It doesn't, you know, it just doesn't have some of the features of a dedicated program that I'm used to. Like split screen, for example. It's really hard to edit things. You can't step through your code.

If you can't look at two pieces of code at once. What do you mean you can't step through your code? You can't step through your code. Oh, debug? Yeah. No. Not that I know of. Printf is your debugger.

Yeah, lights are printf. Or, you know, I have a display, so I can printf to that. Yeah, I was happy with the embed boards. I got a couple for free at the Embedded Systems Conference one year and got to playing with them

and even got to talking to them a little bit. And I was thrilled, and I wanted to start using them everywhere, but they're kind of expensive. Yeah. And for my purpose, I don't care. I think the board I'm using was in the $50 range. Yeah.

But, you know. But it came from our garage, so it wasn't like you actually bought it. It's super full featured. Yeah. And that was good for me because I started out using Serial, and that turned out to be a disaster, because I use a Mac when I'm playing that game. Kerbal's Unity is written in.NET,

and so the plugins had.NET Serial, but that sort of talked to a window. It just got too complicated, and I found something else that just talk to over the network. Well, that's the trouble with doing your own project is figuring out where your bar of annoyance is. Yes. It's like, so... I could be doing something else.

Yeah, I'm doing this for fun in my free time. How much frustration am I willing to spend when I could be being paid for somebody for being frustrated at something similar? And you can be frustrated at somebody else. The person who wrote the code. Right. But when you do it yourself, it's all you. It's, you know, it's been fun.

And I'm not quite done with it yet. I've kind of got each of the pieces working independently, and I haven't really put it all together yet so everything's doing stuff i want i had some you know some issues driving all the control all the displays because they're all different and they all have their quirks got a lot of stuff from spark fun which you know that was pretty cool intro to spark fun just kind of looking through there and going you know not looking for anything specific but saying could i use this in my project and so i got a bunch of parts that i just well i could use that like some shift

registers so i want to control a bunch of leds i could use those and they had a separate ldd controller that could control i think 64 leds from a couple serial lines um stuff like that where it's just like i'll just get one of those They're a couple bucks and maybe I'll put it in. Maybe I won't. Yeah. No, it's a neat project. And watching you work on it is neat because it's very visually satisfying. I mean, you get the altimeter going on the VFD, the big display, and you can really see things happening. It makes the game more real for you can really see things happening. It's like,

makes the game more real for me. I don't play because I don't want to stare at my computer screen any longer. Which doesn't say much because then I just go stare at my iPad. I was about to bring up something. Oh, the reading. Yeah.

No, I was about to bring up Crossy Road. Oh, no, not Crossy Road. Don't admit to Crossy Road. Cross oh no not crossy road don't admit to crossy road crossy road crossy crossy road is why i haven't done anything on my kerbal project in the last week yeah we got a new ipad game or iphone game and it's uh terrible great game it's as though you took frogger and made it infinite and then you also added... Chuck E. Cheese. Animals. Chuck E. Cheese, grabber game. Oh, yeah, because you do kind of randomly get different animals.

I don't know why I said Chuck E. Cheese, but that's what came to mind. The grabber game where you have a crane that goes and gets you a stuffed animal. Yeah, and these aren't real stuffed animals. Wow, we should get off this topic. Or we should just go play. We could bail on the podcast here. We could take the audio from it. People could hear it.

Oh, it's really nice because it has this horrible sound when you get hit by a car. It's very realistic, and I always flinch. But anyway, so my project is... Crossy Road is a giant time suck and christopher's curveball project is going to uh yeah and i'm not definitely not the first person to do this in fact i got the idea for the project off one of the curveball forums where somebody had done this and there's there's varying degrees of sophistication i would say mine is somewhere in the middle but there's some people

who just have like a little keypad thing and one display. And there's some people who have something that looks like they broke into Johnson Space Center and trucked out one of the systems. But you wouldn't go along with making it all steampunk. That just doesn't seem right. I just thought a steampunk space controller would be awesome. Maybe for version two. Maybe that's if I do it. That requires more sophistication in the crafty side of things.

Since I just have a couple of plates of aluminum, I'm going to bolt everything too. Yeah, that makes sense. So while he was working on that, I was working on Wordy, which is a ring. If you tap it, it gives you an interesting word. And I got some very interesting words. And if you tap it again, it gives you a definition. If you double tap it, it plays pong. If you shake it upside down, it acts as a magic eight ball. If you punch in the air and you're really lucky, it will give you a little punch sound, little punch symbols. It doesn't make any sound. But I use that micro view that's an Arduino,

little tiny Arduino-based sort of thing with an OLED screen. And it's big for a ring, but it's amusing. Although what happened after was more amusing. Oh, wait, wait, wait. Don't get to that. I mean, so what have you got? What was your, I mean, not everybody's going to have read that. Oh, no, no, no. I didn't think, what else should I have said?

Oh, it's got an accelerometer. Yeah. I had some trouble because I kept trying to use the 5-volt microview with the 3 volt accelerometer and wondering why, oh it doesn't work and look, there's little scorch marks oops but that's pretty much all it is

is the accelerometer and the micro view and the little battery but you managed to jam it all into a pretty small size it's all a ring I used a 40 milliamp hour battery, which is just about the same size as the width of the micro view. So it's all,

it's all, it's smaller than, you know, my thumb. Okay. And then I used polymer clay and some other weird clay things and made, made it into a ring that fits on, well, I've had the ring pretty much on my fingers depending on

how I built it. And I even wore it to a couple of things. It was a good icebreaker. Yeah, if you're in a group of like, you know, they're all the holiday parties right now. If you're in a group of geeks and nobody is making conversation, if you're sitting there playing with the ring, somebody will say,

what's that? And it breaks the conversation. It breaks the ice. Ruins the conversation. Starts the conversation. Ends the conversation. Well, I had to when I start playing with it and people are still talking. Okay, so you built it

and then you started documenting it. I said I was going to put my next project on Hackaday. So I decided to. And I had been writing a little bit on my blog about it. I do have a blog. Please don't read it. It's terrible. I'll leave the link in the show notes. It's where my first ideas go out to play. And then I usually, if I'm going to write something formal, it gets better after that. But that's like the first pass and there's no editor. But so I wrote a little bit on my blog about doing it and somebody suggested

build instructions. And I went to Hackaday and I made build instructions and a couple of project logs. And that was pretty cool. And I wasn't really done yet, but I did tweet about it because it was done-ish. And then Hackaday picked it up, which was very nice. It got onto the front page. I got a lot more people looking at it than I expected. And I made a little video because it's hard to explain what it does. I mean, the whole tap and shake and punches thing is not completely obvious. So Chris and I made, we took two takes on the video

and then we posted that so you could see it. And now it's been downloaded like 2000 times. It's been watching my video. Um, and then after Hackaday, wrote about it which i mean heck it's their site of course if they want to write about it it's fine but admil came and wrote about it as well and they took all my pictures and it was the first time my words or or me or something i've done that is, you know, just me, was taken by somebody else. I mean, they reprinted my pictures without talking to me. And I guess that's normal, but it was odd. And you said, Chris, that if it had been the New York Times, they wouldn't even have linked it to my page. Well, I was just being mean to the New York Times, but yeah.

You weren't surprised. I mean, I'm not upset. I'm happy. I hope people like it. I hope maybe somebody else builds it, makes a suggestion. Maybe somebody will make some round ring-shaped batteries, and that will be awesome. But it was a little odd. It was a little odd it was a little odd i mean you could see other circumstances being a little bit mad about somebody reappropriating your content but this was more like

i was doing they were directly pointing at your project they weren't just saying hey here's the thing you could do that we're not gonna tell you who did it and they weren't saying they did it so yeah i mean it was it mean, it was nice. It was very complimentary. It was just a little odd. Usually, if I'm quoted in like EE Times or any of the publications, or Kitsela or whatever, it's because they talk to me. And this time it wasn't.

Yeah, no, it's really normal. It's reblogging stuff. Yeah, it was a reblogging thing but it was new um so yeah we'll have a link to wordy so you can see that and if you have suggestions about the uh build instructions i'd feel free to say i'm i'm still kind of playing with the build instructions making the ring was the hardest part, although my method of making five rings and then just using the one that fit was good. And that makes me think about another ring, which is why I had everything kind of out at the table. Starting a new project.

Yes. Although I shouldn't, because it sounds like I'm really going to get a signed contract and we're going to start doing paying work soon. But I started working on, well, okay, so before we get to the other potential project. The conferences. The call for proposals is open for the O'Reilly Solid Conference, which is all about hardware and the Internet of Things and software-made solid. I don't know.

It's embedded-y things. Software-made solid? Is that really their catchphrase? No, I kind of thought it should be. Okay. Call for Proposals closes on 1-12, January 12, and the conference is in May, like May 20-something. And the Embedded Systems Conference, which is no longer named Design West or whatever

name of the week, is now officially the Embedded Systems Conference, has a call for proposals that's open, and that is January 9th when it closes, and that is for the Santa Clara one. The call for proposals for the Boston one is already closed, but I hear a rumor they're still looking for a few more. So if you've got a good idea, I can hook you up with the right person, especially if you're willing to speak at both. Oh, and the Boston conference is in May, and the Santa Clara Embedded Systems Conference is in January. No, I'm sorry, July. Call for proposals ends in January, conferences end in July. Okay.

So, I proposed some talks, but you didn't. Some talks, but I didn't. You say that as if... That's new. That's an accusation or unexpected. It isn't. But, you know, if you know something, sometimes it's good to share it.

I hate conferences. Yeah, I know. Except for the part where you walk around and look at stuff. My favorite part is asking people for dev kits and parts and they say, well, and then you know you've got them hooked. All you have to do is like, no, really, I'll use it and I'll write about it and I'll talk

about it, I'll tell all my friends, I'll take it to my hack space and they'll be like, just stop talking here, have a dev kit. That's worked even for you. I know. I'm just laughing that the goal is to collect as many dev kits as possible as if they were pokemon i said pokemon i don't know why that's pretty funny pokemon yeah i mean pokemon pokemons yeah the plural of pokemon

pokemons this doesn't seem right. I like Pokemon. So three talks I proposed. I proposed a faker to maker in 30 or 40 or 45 minutes or less, depending on the length of time I have. And an introduction to inertial, where I kind of take the information from episode nine with Randy and the one with Tony Rios and actually put it together in a sensible format. And then low power strategies for wearables and everything else,

which I have no new information on. But that one I can sort of just read out of my book. It'll be easy. Not quite, but yeah. But that's a good topic because it's something that doesn't get talked about a lot explicitly i don't think well then i sort of framed it as things to do with the architecture and strategy stage with some notes on the tactics but the how do you design your system to be low power and how do you do it from the start

instead of just trying to slap on sleep modes later yeah because that's what i've seen people do a lot is design a system put all the pieces together find out it lasts half as long as they want and then you know go into optimize but it's you might get another 20% or 30% if you thought about it beforehand. Yeah, and then on Wordy recently, I put up a project log talking about how I did the power management for that. So that got me thinking a little bit more about that. And then the intro to Inertial, I started to work on that, and I started thinking about how to show people

what's happening with accelerometers, gyroscopes, and magnetometers. Yeah. And I already have in my slush, as I write the proposal, I tend to put together 10 slides just to make sure I have enough information. And in that, I have take a know, take a spaceship, take an airplane, take a large car so that I can make hand motions, which I did in the podcast, but of course nobody got to see it there. But one of the things I wanted was a light that would indicate with a magnetometer. And so it'd be like a north star. If you were faced north, it would be white.

And if you were faced east, it would be green or yellow. And if you were faced west, it would be red. If you were faced south, it would be dark. And so it would be like having this little north star wherever you are. And so I started to build that out of the... That's a really cool idea. I mean, it's one of those ambient things

that doesn't have too much going on with it. Well, they have those ankle things where they have little solenoids, and they press on you to help you understand where north is, and so it always has a gentle pressure around your ankle in the direction of north. That's weird. That's pretty neat.

I mean, and it's supposed to be really good for training your brain to understand things it already knows but doesn't interpret wait the idea is like you know where north is after you take no after you take off the ankle you will be much better ankle it you'll be much better at finding north i don't believe you no there are little things in your bread that in your head that have never mind we're not going to go into the neuroscience of direction finding. Oh, no, no, no, I'm really curious about this. But if you knew where... If you could train yourself to know where north was,

you would start using all the things in your brain that already know how to do those things. You're a duck. I'm a duck? Yeah, ducks always know where north are. I'm not a duck. Well, how do you do direction finding at all if you don't know some of that? I know where the sun is.

Most days. I know how the streets are laid out. I have a little thing in my car that says north. You don't have a part of your brain that always tells you home is that way? That's always mine. No, i don't think we have that i i would like to see the the i will find a study study with more than four people um and at least two of those people can't be ducks i will i will find the magnetic anklet um that helps you learn. But it is, I mean, it's supposed to be cool and I figured a light would probably work better for me than what sounded like four pounds of batteries

with little tiny solenoids. Anyway, so I was doing that with the magnetometer and I kind of want a ring, but I don't have all the parts necessary right now because all my parts are big I bought them for other things so you're okay so that's one talk two talks and the other one you said was faker to maker that one sounds more puffy broad I don't know if it's broad. Less technical, exactly. Definitely less technical. And it goes back to that comment of, do you guys go into the lab every day?

And a lot of people compare what their mental monologue is, their insides, with the hype that everybody else has. You shouldn't compare your insides with my outsides because that's not how it works i have no idea what you're saying um okay less metaphor less metaphor uh okay so what you might hear from me if you listen to the show and maybe you follow me on twitter or just one of those two things. It might look like I'm doing all these things, I'm getting stuff done, I'm not dithering, I must work all the time,

especially if you follow other people on Twitter or listen to other podcasts where people are getting things done. And sure, sometimes we talk about books, but occasionally we talk about TV. And next week we're talking all about movies. Give it away. Oh, I figured people could send us movie suggestions.

God, we don't need any more suggestions. It's going to be a five hour show. Especially as we do the live, live part, which includes watching Scorpion together. We're not doing that. We're not doing it.

Anyway. Wait, so you're saying We're not doing it. Anyway. So you're saying it's all a lie. I'm saying that I do get things done, but I don't always show, nobody shows the frustration and the exhaustion and the times when you say, screw it, I'm not even going to the farmer's market, I'm just staying in my jammies

and playing Crossy Road all morning. And so there's that. You shouldn't compare your insides, all of the mental things that go on, all of the wheels that spin, with other people's outsides, which is all the things they're presenting and they've polished and shined up. Well, I think you made a good point a minute ago where you said, you know, who you follow on Twitter is a big part of that. Because if you follow one person on Twitter, you might see them make an update on a project or say they've done something, you know, a couple times a week. Let's say you follow a bunch of maker-type people, 10, 15.

Well, you're going to get stuff from them every day. And your brain is kind of saying, there's this one person out there who's doing all of these things. It's not really true, but you get this sense that people are all out there being busy and making stuff every single day, and progress is continually happening. Yeah. And I don't think that's really the case.

I think there's plenty of us who get discouraged or lazy and are bursty on the projects. Well, yes. And with this whole wordy thing, getting things done, yes, I actually made a lot of progress in a reasonably short amount of time. That's because I'm not currently working. Well, yeah, there's that too. And Wordy is a way for me to show off what I'm doing.

It's a way for me to produce content and maybe to get a few more listeners and to work with Hackaday so that I can suggest them. To learn stuff. And it's can suggest them. To learn stuff. And it's a way for me to learn stuff. And so I'm putting all that out there and showing people it's happening. But realistically, this is as though I had a project at a job. I mean, this is professional me using...

And I don't think as many people understand that all of these make things that happen, sometimes they are professional activities. I mean, even mad scientists, that's their company. Of course they're going to make projects. And I know that Lenora has a good time making the projects, which is great. That means she likes her job, but it's her job. And maybe there's a little bit of choosing a job you love, but... Well, you have a good point.

And I've felt myself fall victim to this, seeing all these people go, God, I'm not accomplishing anything. And then I think, well, I did spend five hours today doing whatever I was supposed to do for my job, and it might have been something tedious, which makes me feel even worse, like porting an old graphics library from the old new old product to the new product,

which is what I spent four hours on today, which doesn't really feel like an accomplishment, but it's something that needs to get done. And it's draining enough that afterward I'm not itching to sit down with some other code editor and, and mess around. And then there's projects, all of us have things that we do that we aren't publicizing necessarily.

I mean, I've been doing a lot of music in the last couple of weeks, and there's writing and other stuff that you do that you're not publicizing. So don't judge yourself based on other people. Yes. But I did want to have this conference based on other people. Yes. But I did want to have this conference talk to say that. Yeah. And then to also address, last summer I had a guy I worked with who considered me part of the maker movement, which I don't really consider me part of the maker movement in part because I hadn't been thinking about these things

the people I know who I do think are part of the maker movement a lot of what they do for that is professional and some of it's for fun I mean Sophie talked about make-cations which I thought was hilarious but I don't know that I've ever stayed home to build things I guess maybe once, twice but I don't know that I've ever stayed home to build things. I guess maybe once, twice.

I stayed home to write my terrible novel, like two days out of 30. I'll put a link to that in the show notes. No. But it's about doing something different. It's sort of like having a vacation. I know Dave at EEV Blog says that a lot, and I agree with him. When I do a lot of writing at work or a lot of management at work, I tend to want to code at home.

If I do a lot of coding at home, I tend to do more writing. If I do a lot of code at work, I tend to do more writing at home. And so doing something different, I think, is good. And the maker community is more about education and curiosity. Advocacy, evangelism. Yeah. And getting more people interested in building things, which is great. And it's not just one set of people. Because there are people who don't build anything or don't have projects. Yeah.

They might enjoy it. And they might not even know that they can build some of these things now which 10 years ago were impossible and now are easy so i think that's that's valuable and i like working with makers they have this holistic view of a product and they tend to be a little more get it done on the other hand sometimes when i've worked with junior engineers who are also makers they don't necessarily understand that a robust reliable system with a documented build system is a good thing um so you know there's there's pluses and minuses.

So, this is your talk? This is sort of my talk. I also want to talk about how there's not a single maker identity. There are fixers. There are people who actually hate the consumerist part of it, who don't want to be called makers because that's about consuming things. They want to be called educators or something else and they're the warranty voiders who think that if you don't take it apart it isn't yours it's like the man's i don't understand that

part and hackers and artists and so are you going to give advice about how to get into things or is this mostly a survey of the movement or of the word maker? I want to give advice on how to get into it. I want to point out that if you have shipped a product, whether it is shipped to a store, to Target, to the other half of your company, to Kickstarter, to a maker fair, or even just reused in the open source community, you have earned your Maker badge. You don't have to be afraid of it anymore. You can join if you want to join. You've already got the badge.

You've got your credentials. You're an engineer. Now, let's stop worrying about them and realize we are them. that well i i do think it would be useful also to maybe discuss um along those lines how how it's an inclusive thing or it should be an inclusive thing, and not feel like... I think there are parts of every movement which are exclusive. Like, well, you're not doing it the right way. Yes. That's part of any clique. Yeah.

And, you know, like you said, some people are very open source, some people are very open source some people are very open hardware some people are very anti uh anti drm or anti as like you said warranty voiding you know if you don't if you don't understand it you don't own it if you can't break it you don't own it um you know if you don't have the code you don't own it but for most of these people even if they do have some aspect of that specialization, they still have the deep core belief of engineering is good

and learning things is good and curiosity is how we all get to be better. Don't you think a big part of the maker movement now is the crossover between art and engineering? Yes, yes, I do have a little bit of that.

I mean, a lot of these projects are art projects that use technology to convey light or movement or sound, and they aren't products. They're one-off installations or demonstrations. Yeah, and a lot of the educators are going that route in order to like sneak engineering in in order in into art because you can get money to to help kids learn how to blink lights more easily than you can get money to help kids have markers. Yeah. So, you know, that art hook is a great hook.

And there's the science, technology, engineering, math people, and then there's people who had aged that for art. And I'm not one of those people, but I can see where they're coming from. So, if there was a person who came up to you after the show and said, I love your talk, I'm really interested in getting involved with this, but I just don't know what to start with. Maybe they are a software engineer at a big company and they write PHP all day or something

that's not associated with devices or making projects. What would you say they should get? Where should they start? Well, I mean, SparkFun is easy, and Adafruit. But more specifically, I mean, that's a place to go, but that's like saying... Well, the thing is that both of those have great tutorial areas, and they have projects. And the way that you got hooked was because it was a

project that actually looked like something you wanted. And so if you could go to Adafruit or Sparkfun's tutorial area and say, oh, you know what I really want? I want a magnetic North Star ring. And look, somebody's made one with an accelerometer. And look, they sell the magnetometer. So I bet I could do this. And maybe not even that changed. I mean, maybe not the one-off. Maybe somebody goes to Hackaday or Instructables and looks at what other people have built and says,

actually, yeah, that doesn't look that hard. And it isn't that expensive, not if you count that this is an educational opportunity. I mean, you will learn something. It may be, wow, that trinket AT tiny is a pain in the neck to program, but you will learn something.

Is that from personal experience this morning? Yeah. I had some driver trouble, stupid windows. It's working now. It's windows. It's working now. It's fine. It's all fine. But you see what I'm saying.

There's a barrier to entry, I think. I think it's more self-imposed. I agree. I agree. But to break that down, you have to hold their hand and say, look at this. And don't worry about coming up with a brilliant idea for a project on your own. Look at what these other people have done and do one of

those to start with or get inspired by one of these. And that's why I would suggest Adafruit and SparkFun because they do have the tutorials. Hackaday has some great tutorials and it has some great projects and sometimes they aren't always the same. Well, and it's less...

Less curated. I think Hackaday is less curated towards that kind of exploration. It's more directed towards people who have a little bit of experience, at least. Yeah, and that's for the person who takes the idea from Adafruit or Sparkfun and says, you know, I'm going to add a little to it. And now they can go to Hackaday and people will comment on their project and make suggestions. It'll be good. Yeah, how else can you convince people to join in?

You didn't hear about the Kerbal from Adafruit and SparkFun. No. But the suggestion of take something you're already interested in and look around for ways to add electronics to it now when you say those words it sounds very discouraging yeah here add some electrons take your dog add some electronics um no i think i think phrasing it as, you know, how can you make something you enjoy more personal and better in some way? Because all of us have things that we enjoy that, you know, we get ideas about, well, this would be better if I could just do this. Even if it's just, you know, I don't know, gardening. You know, oh, it would be better if my plants told me

when they needed water in the house. And you can look around for projects on things that will monitor soil moisture and give you a report. There's lots of things to do like that. So I think for any area of interest, area of interest? There's not two r's in area for any area of interest i think you can find some way to enhance it in a more personal way or to make your life better or to you know not necessarily just be buying something off the

shelf because that's one thing that i think the Internet of Things movement and the productization of those things has made a little sad, is that now you've got all these things you can just buy off the shelf. Which as time goes on, it's going to be a little harder value proposition to say, go build yourself an Internet-connected widget when I can just go buy one that does exactly that, because everything's a product. Yeah. So I think, I think selling it along the personalization lines might work,

might encourage people and the art line, because a lot of people are interested in, in art. And there is also a big movement for parents. I should add that too. Because, you know, there's a whole book now, Maker Dad. He had a blog and now he's got a book. And he's worked with his two young daughters

on not being afraid of doing things. And they do power tools. They made it like a guitar. Then there's electronics projects they do. Some of them seem a little silly, but if you're trying to get across the point of engineering is cool. Well, and you keep saying engineering. I know.

And it's the science and the technology. That word is not a good word. It's not that good of a word. It sounds very boring unless it's involving trains. Choo-choo. See, we're coming to the end of the show. No, yeah, so I would get away from those loaded sort of industry words. Yeah, you're right.

Which sort of drain the conversation. When people say, I love engineering, and I do love engineering, but when people say it and I hear it, I feel sad. All right, cool. I will search for engineering and make sure it's not in here. Yeah, so I'm not sure either ESC or Solid is a good place for that talk. It may be some random smaller thing, but... Solid more than ESC.

I just am shocked that people are still like... But anybody who's going to be at that conference is already going to be clued in. I was just pretty surprised to find people who are sort of afraid of the maker people. I thought... Is it the beards? Maybe.

No, some of it was the anarchy of it. The, oh my God, these people have blogs, and they write whatever they feel like on their blogs. No, if they're NDAs, they're smart, but if they can write on their blog, they will. And, oh, you brought in that thing that looks like it took you all weekend. And I'm like, no, they just bought it. And then they made it out of the bought things.

And I was just really surprised people are still afraid of makers. So where did you encounter this? Oh, really? No, I don't think that's right. I'm not going to say. Oh, okay. It just seems these were technical people. Very technical people.

Sort of dyed-in- in the wool industry, folks? Yes. And industry all over industry. And it's just that now that there's 3D printing and you've been hearing about Maker for long enough, there is some threat to engineering. I mean, what if some kid who's been building things since he was four wants my job?

That's honestly the dumbest thing I've ever heard. Yeah, and yet... The threat to your job from the maker movement? These people aren't making products, first off. And that's another thing I do want to say. If you're threatened by somebody who's making stuff in their garage your product isn't very good it's kind of like the the people who are threatened by you know the industries that are threatened by disruption from you know some little startup that's if your product is not good enough to

escape disruption then there's nothing you're going to do about it. Well, on the other hand, I want some of those dyed-in-the-wool industry folks to consider picking up a soldering iron or checking out SparkFun. Yeah, because they'll make better stuff. They'll make better stuff, and maybe if they've gotten bored, if they've gotten tired of that word engineering

because they've been doing it for too long, this is an area where it's okay not to make something robust. Right. Well, that's one of the things that going back to my stupid project, I had to stop myself because I was writing the worst code I've ever written in my life. I did that at Mordia. I did a whole bunch of electrical mistakes that I know better. I was just slamming stuff together. And if it worked, then that was done. And I said, stop it.

Organize this code. Write it out on a pad for five minutes. Five minutes, and it'll be better. And it was. I started moving things into modules, and this controls this. And I can replicate this code in a few places instead of redoing it. But it was that temptation to just kind of throw caution to the wind and throw stuff together. I can replicate this code in a few places instead of, instead of redoing it. It was just, but it was that temptation to just kind of throw caution to the wind and throw stuff together.

It's kind of liberating, but you have to kind of fight against it, I think too, because that leads to frustration later and might make you dump the project. Yeah. But it's good to know about. But that is saddening that people are threatened by the maker movement.

I mean, it seems to me like, I don't know, that's like NPR being threatened by ham radio. They're completely different things. Well, and ideally they work together and it's better. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Well, that might be something, that might be another angle on that talk, is to try to not necessarily encourage people to enter the maker movement, but to encourage people to understand it and not have that reaction.

Well, that was with the maker badge. If you wanted a maker badge, you've already got one. It seems similar to the reaction people had with open source when open source was sort of first becoming a thing. Like, who are these people? It feels like anarchy. They're stealing. They're doing stuff for free.

We don't do stuff for free. I realized as I was working on Merty and all of the writing of the instructions and the content generation that I was doing stuff for free and all of the writing of the instructions and the content generation, that I was doing stuff for free that other people get paid for. And that goes back to that Atmel reblogging thing. I wonder if I should have gone to someone and said, I will write about this project if you'll pay me.

But I wasn't... You wouldn't have done it the same way. No. And I'm happy with the way I did it. i'm not happy with the way everything turned out i'm still working on it but it was for me and and that was enough yeah and i guess that that does kind of that does go back to the maker thing which is maybe i mean i did maxwell and i wrote a tutorial and and that was cool but i still don't really feel like i'm part of the maker movement when you say movement it implies a certain advocacy and evangelism and a manifesto and

they're at the white house now they're at the white house now all of them all of them right now i mean as soon as i snap my fingers security wasn't very good there no there's there's been a big push i understand it is trying to mainstream it but it doesn't there's a lot of these movements that are distributed and i think trying to nail it down and say this is the maker movement it's just going to lead to tears because you're going to get disagreed with by 30 of it at least no matter what angle you take so it's you know it's it's good to be vague yeah um so yeah well that's cool I think I think

there's a lot for a good talk there I hope so but I don't I agree I don't know where to give that one well at the end

if I end up writing the talk and can't find it anywhere I'll put it on my blog my very bad blog very bad blog

then I won't spell check it that actually My very bad blog. Very bad blog. Then I won't spell check it. That actually covers my list. You've run out of things? Well, we could go back to gifts and I could talk about Marimo. What's a Marimo? Oh, that.

He's a little moss ball and he lives in water. And somehow he has personality even though it's a plant is moss plant? it's not an animal I guess not it's not a fungus and it's green I'll go with plant

but he comes with little stories and yeah if you need a ridiculous pet for someone, where pet is in air quotes, yeah. So, Marimo, can you hook it up to the internet? Oh man, that would be awesome. I could hook up a Raspberry Pi with a little camera and anybody could watch Marimo as he does absolutely nothing. Marimo's sort of the new pet brock well he's alive actually a little while for a little while what do you mean well it's a ball of moss what are you going to do to it fail to change its water put it in direct sunlight i I don't know. Feed it after midnight? Yes.

All right. Well, sounds like we're out of topics. Well, we could probably find new ones, but we probably should get some work done tonight, too. Next week. Next week. You want to tease the next show? Yeah. So next week, we're going to have Jen Castillo back.

And the three of us are going to do a draft format rundown of the movies which inspired us to become techie people. You're totally going to avoid the word engineering from now on, huh? You saw those gears turning in my head? That was nice. Yes, it is the fiction, inspirational fiction. Wait, we've expanded it to all fiction? I have to redo my list.

This show's going to be real. I have a book on mine. That's fine. No, that's good. Okay, so inspirational fiction from our formative years. From our formative years. And let us into engineering. Recognizing that our formative years may not be your formative years,

we are going to have one round of the draft, which is retconning our inspiration, which is things that we wished had been in our formative years because that would have been cool. It would have been better. It would have been better. All right. So, this should be completely ridiculous.

But that one goes up on Christmas Eve, so it's going to be pretty silly. Yeah. And then after that, I'm going to tease the next one in hopes that this does not make it awful. You've got the whole schedule. Do you want to run down the schedule for the next year? No, because every time I need something, it falls through. All right, all right.

Tempt fate. After that is the ramen pie creator. Oh, excellent. Yeah. Yeah, I want to talk to them. I don't know if he's going to do the voice changer thing or not, but I don't think so. I'll have to pull out my optical physics textbook.

Oh, yeah, you can quiz him. It'll be good, really good. So we'll know how to build spectrometers in the new year. And then we can spectroscope. Are you going to go with that? Spectralize. Spectralize. Spectralize. All right.

Well, yeah. We can specter something. I'm going to read the outro now. Well, wait a minute. There's a, well, we're about out of time. Christopher, anything else you'd like to add? Yes, I had some philosophical points I wanted to bring up regarding ethics in game journalism. Really?

No. Oh, my God. I just didn't really think you would. I wasn't. Anything else? I think we should stop. All right, all right. Thank you to Christopher White for holding down the other mic.

Sure. And for producing the show. Sure. And for my new mute button. Which isn't plugged in. It does nothing. You can hear it, though. When I push the button, nothing happens.

But someday... I thought you were going to give that to me. You were going to mute me? Let's see what he gets for Christmas. I already know what I'm getting for Christmas. Awesome. Thank you for listening. Hit the contact link at embedded.fm

or email us at show at embedded.fm. Or if you want to talk to the nice... Oh, wait. If you want to talk to the nice beagle in the other room, also email us. If you want to talk to the nice beagle in the other room, also email us. If you want to talk to the editor of these show notes, which has stuff from the last show in it. Yeah, exactly. We run a high-quality program here.

We do, we do. A team of dedicated copy editors and researchers. Researchers. Ah, I have a final thought for you this week, which is more than I had for most of the show. This one's from Walt Disney. You can design and create and build the most wonderful place in the world, but it takes people to make the dream a reality.