Embedded - 89: I Have New Batteries

Episode Date: February 18, 2015

Chris Savage (@SavageCircuits) talks about building a community and about stopping projects when life intrudes. His site is Savage Circuits. He has a YouTube channel. He has Savage Circuit TV which are the longer, more in depth videos and Short Circuit for the shorter ones. Also see his forums. Chris works for Parallax and had some kit suggestions: BOE-BOT (board of education bot), its successor the ActivityBot, and the ELEV-8 Quadcopter Kit. Chris is also a writer for Nuts and Volts. At the top of the show, we mentioned Chris' wife. Here is Ken Gracey's request for help. Or you can skip that and use the PayPal link on the Savage Circuits thank you page. (No PayPal account required.)

Welcome to Embedded, the show for people who love building gadgets. I'm Alicia White, alongside Christopher White. Our guest today is Chris Savage, the creator of Savage Circuits, a project website devoted to microcontrollers and electronics. Before we get started talking to him, though, I have a small apology to him, Chris, our guest. You know, we usually try to have our ducks in a row, but this week I got sick. I got Chris sick, which is why he won't be on the mic much today. My shoulder was healing up OK, but went kerplooey.

OK, so I went on to do a bit of whining about a really, really normal but sort of crummy week. However, this week's guest, Chris Savage, had his own terrible news. His wife was diagnosed with terminal stage four cancer. He mentioned her on the show, but not the severity. This week, Ken Gracie of Parallax, Chris's employer and friend, put out a call for assistance, financial assistance. So if you can give up a luxury or two, it will make life a little easier for two people who've brought hope, knowledge,

and laughs to so many. The link is in the show notes. Thank you for being a great group of people. Now, back to the show. Hi, Chris. Thanks for being on the show today. Greetings. Thank you for having me on the show. Could you tell us a bit about yourself? Well, I am an engineering tech at Parallax Inc. for my day job. But going back to my hobby, my field of interest, I've been into electronics since probably 1980. And I love to experiment and tinker with things, but I was also a design engineer for many years, and I'm also a musician. That's a nice collection of things.

I mean, a lot of people are electronics and music and engineering, and I'm always sort of fascinated that this is a bundle of interests and skills that come together. I do some video editing too, but yeah, I just try to get into everything that relates to bringing electronics content, microcontroller content to other people through social media. And so Savage Circuits is a website, but it's a pretty big website of different York. And I just kind of set aside this part for projects where I would say, here's a little thumbnail, here's the name of the project, and here's like a brief description of it. When you'd click the thumbnail, you'd get kind of the build, all the pictures of the project being built in progress. And at the end,

there would be downloads for the code and the schematics and all that stuff well in 2005 i moved from new york to california to work for parallax inc and um so i took down my personal website and i didn't think too much of it but of course a lot of people knew about the site and so ken gracie from parallax said hey you know ch, what happened to your site? You had all these cool projects. And so I was kind of inspired to put it back up from out here, but make it more dedicated, not just some section on a personal website. Well, and now I use, I have a personal website and I've used it for some of these projecty things. But now with Hackaday being out there and having sort of a built-in community that I don't have to build myself,

I tend to use that for projects. But you added a forum, and so you have other people's projects, and you have a video tutorial series. Well, it started out, though, just as a showcase of my own projects. There was no forums, there was no, there were videos, but everything was just like hand constructed HTML all the way up to 2010. It was a very simplistic site, but I kept getting email from people

asking me, you know, what if I want to ask questions on your projects or what if I want to, you know, post my modifications to it or what, what I did with it or, you know, things like that. And they wanted to be more interactive and be able to comment on things. And I didn't really have a facility for that. So in 2010, I started looking towards that and I put up a simple machines forums software to do that and kind of experimented on it and just to back up a little you mentioned hackaday a lot of these sites are kind of blog driven and i also used to put my projects up on sites like that but then if the site went down then all the work i did was kind of lost and so i really wanted to have my own place to keep it up

where I didn't have to rely on somebody else to make sure that the projects were there and that they could be found. Also, they tend to get churned under. In other words, you post something and then somebody mentions five years later, hey, whatever happened to that project you did? And you have to go and try to find it on the site. I believe in backups. Hackaday is where I share things things not where i have my only copy

um so what made you expand it well when i so the so people started giving me feedback and they said hey let you know wouldn't it be really cool to do this wouldn't you know be really cool to do that and i was like yeah i guess and like i, I experimented a little bit with simple machines. I thought the forum might be the way to go. And I kind of thought that because I came up through the years on bulletin board systems and forums these days are about the closest thing to that. And it lends well to interactive capabilities and the ability to showcase things but uh then i had um you know the files and in managing everything was a little difficult through the forums and of course it's not easy to find stuff uh on forums as far as projects goes because again chatter tends to shove things down so i i tried to find different ways to solve that and someone suggested uh putting up like a um a gallery and a portal and

kind of like bringing everything together and we tried that didn't work and then i found the v bulletin software that i'm using which has a front-end cms section and the forms are separate so that you can keep your projects basically in the front page, but then you can still kind of have chatter in the background that's linked to it. Makes sense. And you have monetized some of this. And I ask because we talk about monetizing the podcast or other stuff, but we do actual work towards that. And I'm always curious how other people manage. So if you're okay talking

about it, do you make money from this? Not as much as you'd think. What happened was, initially, the hosts that I had for my website were based on the amount of bandwidth that I generate. And my site typically has an average of 40 connections to it at any given time and things and people and spiders and all that kind of stuff are always accessing the site and chewing up bandwidth so what i decided to do was make it so that if you're a member of the site if you're signed in you don't see any of those advertisements if you're just a guest and you're just coming in you're leeching from the site but you're not really contributing you're not signed If you're just a guest and you're just coming in, you're leeching from the site, but you're not really contributing, you're not signed in, you're not a member, then the ads there are linked to my Google AdSense account, which is the same thing as

the YouTube videos. So any YouTube videos I have that are my own, I monetize those too, so that the more views they get, it generates some revenue. But I think in, let's see, it's 2015, and since 2012 or 13, when I got the site back up and running again, because it was down for about a year, I haven't even made $200 of monetization. That doesn't seem like that's worth doing a lot of work in order to get money for that.

But you haven't really been on the site a lot, have you? No. So you asked me about expanding the site originally, and I didn't really emphasize on that. So there was about six or seven other people that shared interest with me that came to one of the Parallax Expos and said, hey, I have some really good ideas about things we can do with your site and they wanted to basically make this huge kind of hackerspace online where everybody could come and and bring their projects

and do videos and we were gonna have all these we have all these big things going on like we had IRC chats we got people like you know Joe Grand and Jerry Ellsworth and stuff to come in every week and we'd have a Friday night IRC chats. We got people like, you know, Joe Grand and Jerry Ellsworth and stuff to come in every week and we'd have a Friday night IRC chat. And I started modifying the website to accommodate all these other things that we were doing, like to integrate the IRC right into the website. So I was kind of like hacking the site up and expanding it we had a um another member who was doing this uh what he called a traveling junk box where you would fill the the box up with a bunch of parts and people would sign up on a list and you'd send the parts out

to the next person on the list and they would take some stuff out put some stuff back and do that and so that was another little thing we ran and we had a monthly giveaway because a lot of companies will donate equipment for us to use in videos and to give away and stuff and so we had all these different things coming together in the site but it got to be where everybody wanted to kind of like do things their own way and uh so about six of the the people that basically were a major portion of my website all like branched off and decided to just do their own thing and so when that happened um i started kind of deconstructing the site trying to shrink it back down and in the process everything that built it to the way it was was all part of of the database. And I think it was 2012, making so many like reverse modifications with a database that was designed to handle everything that had been put in, caused it to crash. And my site was down for almost a year.

And at the time, I had been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. So my health was kind of my focus for a while. That seems quite reasonable. So yeah, that's what caused me to kind of pare things down at that time. So up to about 2010, it was a personal site. And then 2010 to about 2012, it became a group site with lots of effort. Correct. Yep. And then it went down for a little while as you tried to pare it back and life intervened.

And now it's kind of pared back and... Well, again, it's just kind of like you were saying at the beginning of the show, it's not just one thing that happens that kind of gets in the way of things. It's more than one. My wife ended up being diagnosed with breast cancer back in 2012. And so my efforts to go and put the things back up and running I you know my focus was on her chemo and stuff like that so and what really happened is I think the big thing is and I've seen I've heard this from other people that have had sites but when you really get things built up and going it's really hard if if any part of it falls apart in any way because once people kind of move away from the site, it's really hard to get them back. I think that's very, very true.

There is some advantage to being the new hotness. And even if it goes down for a little while or it isn't as interesting for a little while, people wander off and they don't come back because you're not new anymore. Well, that and another interesting twist in things was the Parallax forms had always been a support forms for the most part. And we didn't really have good software but sometime after i put up the v bullet and parallax switched to v bullet and software 2 and had groups and blogs and things like that all available but of course with a bigger community so what happened is a lot of people were also members of the parallax forums and then they didn't really want to have so many accounts like they didn't want to have to register on multiple sites

and have to sign into multiple sites to get all their information so people will go for the bigger sites and of course parallax is definitely a much bigger uh forms than mine and so moving on to that uh what what do you do for parallax what's your day-to-day job uh so i'm an engineering tech i originally came out in 2005 and took a tech support position because that was all that was available and then when an engineering position opened up i started doing that for several years and then not too long ago a couple of the tech support guys that we had they moved off to other things and they basically needed me back in tech support again. So I'm doing that right now. And then I'm also training a couple of other tech support agents. And I want listeners to realize that this isn't some sort of deja vu.

We did have Chip on the show two weeks ago from Parallax, Chip Gracie. And of course, you know that because you helped me set it up. I should also say thank you to listener Mason Holquist for suggesting both you and Chip as guests. But when I asked Chip about some applications that use the propeller chip, he said machinery was an area he could think of. But I suspect it's much bigger than that.

I think I uh got him talking about the propeller too and we were so focused on that is propeller oem'd into other things with its multi-core weirdness well when it first came out it was a very difficult um architecture for people to wrap their heads around everybody grew up with the concept of interrupts. If you wanted to run multiple tasks, everything was interrupt driven. I myself worked with the 6502 and the Z80 for more than 10 years, and it's a completely interrupt driven architecture. So here we're handed this chip that has eight cores, doesn't require interrupts to do anything, and it doesn't require dedicated hardware for things like UARTs counter timer circuits and a lot of people just didn't know what to do with it um but but a lot of the companies and and um i want to say like contractors or uh smaller people that help integrate for say

industrial stuff they were attracted to the concept of being able to do so much with so little hardware and industrial machine control just happens to fit that bill because at the time the propeller came out a lot of the machines had vga monitors and keyboards and mice hooked up to them but those are single board computers that don't have io on them so then you have to connect that to some kind of off-board data acquisition system just to interface to the machine. And so here's the propeller providing you with a means of running your machine and displaying your VGA information and having your keyboard and mouse input all without a computer with an operating

system. That does lead to interesting applications but uh was the basic stamp better accepted the basic stamp has just been around for so long that it's found its way into a lot of applications including industrial control a lot of times in industrial control PLCs use ladder logic, but I mean a basic stamp is a single-tasking microcontroller, and you can do a lot of things, especially in industrial control with it, providing you have the electrical interface. And so it's just been around for so long

and been integrated into so much stuff over the years that it definitely has a corner on the market, so to speak, in that sense. So moving away from where things get OEMed, Parallax is known for being an education sort of company. How do they do for education for the people who work for them well we've got we have an educational department that focuses on writing materials for classrooms and schools so that teachers don't have to say hey i want to do this robotics curriculum but i don't know how to set it up i don't know what to do i don't know how to teach the course we train the teachers and we provide them with the materials so they can like we'll have an educator course we'll bring 20 teachers and we'll give them the the robotics with the bobot kit and we'll say here's this kit we'll walk you through it we'll

show you we'll teach you just like you're going to teach the students and answer any questions you may have and then when they leave they have the foundation to be able to to teach their students i mean maybe they were teaching wood wood shop or ceramics class or something and now they're going to go and teach students what a microcontroller is and how to make a small robot out of it and how long do the teachers stay with you um it's usually a two-day course and they get a a bobot robot in the kit um that's typically how it works we also have the activity bot now which is a propeller based version of that which is obviously much more powerful i don't think i i know the bow the bow bot is that how you say it yes yep i've always said bowie bot

how funny um because it's boe for board of education correct and uh how okay so why is that well the board of education is well it was designed to be an educational platform for a a classroom because it can run off from a a nine volt battery or from a dc wall supply so So there's a microcontroller introduction called what's a microcontroller that's based around that board. And then the robotics with the Boba is a kind of an alternate introduction of microcontrollers that's more based on robotics. And so they both use that same board, that board of education. And so did the board of education design the board?

That seems strange that that didn't happen, right? Because I'm just not picturing. Oh, you mean like in the educational institution? No, our company designed the board to be friendly enough for classroom use, but be powerful enough. Like the Board of Education has a socketed microcontroller on it. It has a power switch and it has mechanically interlocked power circuits. So you can either power it from a 9-volt battery or a DC supply, but you can't connect them both at the same time. So it kind of eliminates the problems with having a short between two supplies. And then it's got the small breadboard area on it to work. Basically,

all you'd need to do what we have for educational curriculums, which right now, we don't have everything that we used to. But 10 years ago, there were at least a dozen different educational curriculums that could be run off that same board. Who develops these curriculums that could be run off that same board. Who develops these curriculums? Our education department develops them, and then they work with our engineering department to actually make the boards happen. And so the education department of Parallax comes up with these ideas on how to develop the curriculum, and then they go work with the board of education to get them okayed okay so there's there's no it's it's kind of funny because the

board's called the board of education but there's no real um entity board of education that really affects our educational stuff i mean we get feedback from teachers on things that they'd like to see but all the internal design stuff happens right at Parallax without any external kind of input, for lack of a better word. Okay, okay. I have always been confused about that then. I thought that it was some sort of officially mandated sort of, you have to mandate what's in textbooks sort of thing and i'm yeah clearly baffled not with our stuff but i mean you you do have these new um systems like stem and first and things like that where they're kind of defining what what's supposed to be in the in the curriculum and in some of that we are trying to stay compliant with it so that those educational institutions that are part of that can use our products. But that's not typically the motivation for the products that we currently have.

That makes sense. And so you have a quadcopter kit too. Yes. So you were asking about the propeller. And it isn't a lot of industrial stuff. But the other thing that really makes it attractive is any type of system that really could benefit from having the multiple cores. And that would be robotics. Some people started off with things like there's a customer that built a sailboat that's auto navigating.

It uses GPS and waypoints and is able to basically sail itself across the ocean. And then there's regular robots. Think about a robot that has a wheel-driven system or a track system, and then it's got different types of sensors and inputs. You've got all these different cores to handle all these individual components and tie them all together and interface them to either a laptop or in the case of like the Eddie robot that we used to have. You can make a telepresence robot and do stuff with a webcam and interface everything over the Internet through either a like an Xb wi-fi or some other way to to communicate with a remote targeted system that could see and you know transmit video and audio data back and forth and then still control the robot over that connection cool well i i i do not doubt we could just talk about different parallax projects for a long time. There are so many neat ones. Do you have a favorite?

Well, the Elevate is definitely one of the best examples of taking the technology and really implementing it in a way that really shows off what it can do because multiple rotors and control like that that's the quadcopter yes it'll be yep how much weight can it carry well there's there's two quadcopter platforms that we've built and the the first one can carry a couple pounds no problem the um they built a super which we didn't make a product out of but it went to a uh like a quadcopter competition i wasn't there unfortunately but from what i understand we were able to lift i think 10 pounds with it and won that uh weightlifting competition and for about 500 bucks that's wow that's probably more than i want to

spend to get something i can crash in a weekend but it would be a great way to get somebody interested in in engineering because flying things are cool well and ours is a kit whereas a lot of the ones that you can go to, if you go to Fry's or someplace and buy a quadcopter, it's typically all put together for you. You don't, it's a closed system. You don't see the internal electronics. You don't have anything to do with the programming. And you don't really have too much to do with the programming on ours too, that the firmware is already pre-written, but the electronics and everything, the way that everything is controlled, the interface between the radio and going through all the different subsystems

out to the rotor itself is all being put together by you which means that when i break it i can probably fix it correct yep that's the to me that is the best reason to build things from kits is because then i might have a chance fixing it. Yeah, no proprietary parts. In fact, we even have crash kits that have the most common broken parts like the propellers themselves and the motor mounts out at the end and things that get broken are all in this crash kit. So if you happen to damage damage it you can just take it off and replace it so going back to parallax as a company what is it like to work there well um i had i had been running my own businesses in new york um before i found out about the position at parallax and i was willing to shut down everything i was doing and relocate to

California from New York to go work there because I had heard nothing but good things about what it was like to work in the company and I was not disappointed being there and it's kind of anyone who works for a living doing the things that they love can totally appreciate that, to actually be doing that, to be happy to go to work and not be looking at the clock and waiting to get out at the end of the day. And that's what it's like there. You're in this situation where you're working with the technology that you used to use as a hobbyist and as a designer. And now it's part of your day-to-day job.

You're helping define the technology and to fix the problems that maybe you saw with it before you got there. That is kind of a privilege. There's always the other side of that sword, though, which is when you start working on your hobbies, they aren't as much fun outside of work. Do you ever still get to play? Yeah, I'm one of the rare individuals there that I do use the product outside of Parallax.

And I try to limit what I'm doing there to things that are focused on the company. And my website actually helps me do that. Because I try to put things, even though I'm using the same stuff at work as I'm using in my hobby time at home, I have them isolated at work. I'm working on products. I'm getting documentation done, writing code, making test procedures. I'm working with the technology that I like to work with and I'm comfortable with and I know it and I understand it. And I'm taking tech calls and answering emails and I'm doing all of that stuff. But then when I come home, I'm like, okay, I have this project, this thing I want to make that, you know, we're not working on that at work.

We're not doing that in Parallax. That's just a separate project thing. And so you do still get to find time to play with these things you haven't had a lot of updates to your site recently no i've i've been helping a few individuals um that i've met through parallax through tech support either through email or on the phone that have had their own issues and i've kind of um because the the problems were too complex where we won't really deal with that kind of stuff um in parallax tech support i've kind of moved them over to my website so that the their bigger goals could be realized over a longer period of time and that other people could benefit from the time spent doing those things but uh basically right now um i i mentioned that my my wife was

diagnosed in 2012 with breast cancer and so she went through her chemo and got past that it's time but of course not everything works out the way you intend and she had a recurrence and so i'm kind of like back to trying to get her through chemo again and stuff but i do intend to get back to the site it'll never be what it was um but i do have plans that i've worked with other companies to help implement you know companies that have um had a vested interest in in me working with their products and sharing the information with people. And I will get back to that at some point. I like that confidence.

It's hard for me sometimes when I have these projects I work on, whether it's a big project like the site has been for you, or even just a small light-up-shoes sort of thing i want to do it's hard to start again yeah the um i started a video series um on 2009 savage circuits tv and that was when the site had as i mentioned we i had about six other people that were that had their own little things going on but were working with me to try to bring everything together and i started doing that then and then realized quickly after the after people had taken off and gone and done their own things that that caused some of the videos i did to become somewhat historically inaccurate because like the the irc thing that the guy is

the main guy that ran the irc channel left and um he there was some modifications to the website that were dependent on code he wrote to interface to my channel and once that stuff went a video i had done that that mentioned that was no longer technically accurate. And so I took a break from that show to rethink how I was going to present things in the future and to limit my or a video series like I was, is to try not to do anything that can become obsolete like that, that can change on you, and you've talked about it in your videos, and then people see the videos and they go, hey, whatever happened to your IRC channel? Well, things change. I mean, at the end of our show, we always give out our email address, show at embedded.fm. And yet, at the beginning of when the show was first created, it was called Making Embedded Systems.

So it was show at makingembeddedsystems.com. And someday, show at embedded.fm is going to get too much spam, and we'll change it. And all of those shows are probably going to get not changed. Instead, we'll just have a little replier that says something. I don't know what we'll do, but I don't think you can ever keep it perfectly current. You can just do the best you can and move on. I mean, because you had a lot of good episodes on your Savage Circuits TV with the quadrature encoders and the Salie logic.

I liked that because I really like that product. But I liked what you talked about, logic analyzers versus oscilloscopes. And lots of pretty decent technical deep dives in various things. Yeah, and there's a lot of that stuff out there, too. And that's another thing i've been thinking about is if you want to learn how to use an oscilloscope there's probably a dozen youtube channels that you can get that information from but i was trying to keep it within the lines of the project and hobbyist community that i'm familiar with and so moving forward i do have

more stuff like that coming but it won't be like i said as dedicated as what some people do like here's an entire show about how to use an oscilloscope or how to use a multimeter more or less since i'm also working in tech support at parallax i'm thinking ahead towards how this kind of stuff could benefit, say, customers there. In fact, I also write magazine articles for Nuts and Volts and Servo. And the most recent article was about how to get the most out of tech support. That was published in the February 2015 Nuts and Volts. But the one before that that I did was called Tools of the Trade. And that's where I talked about the different kind of tools that are on my desk and what I use not only at work but what I use at home to realize my hobbyist goals and projects.

So with the Nuts and Bolts article, the best ways to get the most out of tech support what did you say well the thing is is that sometimes people call or they'll email us and they'll say i have your product here and i've tried everything and it doesn't work and what they don't realize is that at the time maybe maybe it's frustration or they're just really new they don't understand that's not really enough information to really give any kind of answer. So if it's an email, you can go back and forth several times just trying to get enough information to be able to provide any kind of solution. And on the phone, I find myself a lot of times waiting for somebody to explain where they bought their product and how they got it

and what they're going to do with it before they get to the actual problem. And none of that stuff really can get us to a solution. So I was trying to provide some ways to help people get help quicker, because the longer you spend on it, the more kind of frustrating it can be to get to the solution. Yes. Having been on both sides of that, on one hand, please, please help me. Your product doesn't seem to work. Make it work. Make it work.

Because I have deadlines is one side. And the other side is I'd be happy to help you make it work if you just make sure that you actually have the product that came from my company. Sorts of basic elemental, have you turned it on sorts of solutions, because that comes up. The whole, are there volts actually being applied to the circuit comes up so often. Yeah, the power issues are the most common. And the most common response is, well, I have new batteries.

But that doesn't mean the batteries are good. Are they put in correctly? Right. Or there could be some other issue like, yeah, you have all brand new batteries in, but either there's a break in the power cable or the switch isn't on. Yeah, we really shouldn't make fun of people who fail to power their devices, given how many times I've personally done that. Well, it's more about making sure that they know about the simple things before they contact us. Exactly. And so, yeah, it looks like for Nuts and Bolts, you have to have a subscription or a login. Is that true?

Or is there, if I just click on enough buttons here, I can see the articles? Well, if you either have a magazine subscription to get a hard copy, or they do have an online version, which again, you still have to subscribe. I've linked many of the articles on my website, and you can see a preview of them. And usually you can download, if there's a download for it, that'll be available on the Nuts and Volts or Servo website. But yeah, you typically have to have a subscription to read the articles, the full article. Oh, I see.

Yeah, the preview. You get a couple of pages so you get an idea whether or not you want to. I'll put a link in the show notes. So do you mostly write for them or for Parallax? Does that question even make sense? Yes. Years ago, what got me into writing for them was I wrote for Parallax. There were some things I worked on at Parallax that we wanted to see get out there in using parallax products but you know timing constraints and resources that

you know at work kind of prevented me from continuing on that and so basically on my own time I decided well I have this project website where I share these projects I build and I was encouraged to publish those in the magazines and make those available and show people how to build them and that kind of uh gave me another outlet well and it still means you get to build i hate to say this you get to build the brand of yourself um because you do still have a website and you you are still i, as you mentioned, you intend to restart that. And while you obviously really like Parallax and working there, it's nice to have options. Yeah, I mean, I don't think that the site will ever be the way that I really wanted it to be,

which was this, it started to be. When I had those other people that kind of went off on their own, we were going to have this huge community where we'd have people from every kind of platform together and showcasing not only various projects, but having these different little things that they did, like the traveling parts box thing, which I've since picked up on my own. But I do still want to continue to provide uh basically example

projects on how to do things and i still do that i'm still posting like if i get enough calls where somebody says hey how do you control a robot from an android um application uh over the internet and so i have similar calls, like I've got this robot, but I don't want to use a radio control. I want to use like, say, an Android. How do I do that? And so one of the most recent things I did was posted on there exactly how to do that.

How to use a XB Wi-Fi module and an Android app and connect to your robot and control it. And then that's going to be expanded to doing it right over the internet. So you could do like telepresence robotics. android app and connect to your robot and control it and uh then that's going to be expanded to doing it right over the internet so you could do like telepresence robotics and that just evolved from just hearing enough people ask me how do you do this well and that that's a video and it it wasn't on the savage circuits tv main channel it was on the short circuits tv

which is smaller videos yes so short so savage circuits tv was supposed to be a show and the first 10 episodes were kind of like to play around and figure out what i wanted to do and define the show and kind of get it rounded out and it was right about that time that that things changed so drastically on the website that i i was kind of forced to rethink everything but i i later came back and I just said, okay, that there's plenty of times when someone asks me how to do something and I want to really quick show them, but I don't want to make a whole show out of it. So I thought I would make these little short videos and it just kind of, you know,

the name kind of was Catchy Short Circuits. And so that's a whole separate thing to just, again, just like the XBWiFi thing or controlling a Bobot over Bluetooth. These are little things that I'll make little short videos out of and put up to answer questions without waiting for the next big episode to come out. I think that's one of the important keys to restarting the projects outside work, the things you do for fun or whatever it is that draws us to do these extracurricular things, making it easy.

I mean, you didn't want to wait for a longer show. You think, okay, I think I can explain this in five minutes. I'm just going to do it in five minutes. I'm not going to do all the things that could be done. I'm just going to do the simplest possible. And for me, that helps me re-engage with the whole thing. Are you finding that too, or is it just,

are you happier doing the short ones? Because that's how long it takes you to finish this thought. Yeah, so if the video is going to be focused to something and it's going to be a part of like i said a forum-based project rather than a cms article or or a servo or nuts and bolts article-based project then the short circuits videos are a good way to kind of get that concept across. But I also just sometimes take a quick five-minute video with my phone and post it in another just other video section of the website just so I have a place to put videos that I embed into the forum threads

that say, okay, here's how you do this one thing. And it was easier to describe it in a video than trying to type it in text and even show pictures. and so there's kind of like three levels to the videos there's the there's the show itself which i haven't quite restarted yet there's the short circuits which are the more dynamic and focused videos and then there's just hey you know here's how to do this quick little thing yeah that makes sense so when you were doing the the show the biggest one it looked like you had sponsors and you look like you were reviewing products that maybe you hadn't paid for not not that you had taken them from anywhere that didn't come out right

so what happened was um initially i had uh this idea that I was going to also do some product reviews and kind of like the tutorials with test equipment. There's dozens of sites out there doing that. But again, I was trying to get, when you watch some of those, some of the shows are just so technically comprehensive that hobbyists can't relate to what the people are saying because they never work at that level. They don't understand those concepts. They want to know, how do I turn this thing on and get some useful information out of it when I've never used this before? And especially with the oscilloscope, that's a really difficult thing for some people to grasp. And yet, if they have the tool, and many people do, it's very useful if you know how to use it. And so that's actually what the next Savage Circus TV episode is going to be about.

So how that relates to sponsors is that I had somebody approach me many years ago and say, hey, we're interested in your show, and if you don't have some of these products you want to use, we can supply them for you, and if you use them in your show, then hey, that works out for us. So I thought, well, I wasn't really sure that ethically I wanted to do things in that manner, but I thought, you know what, if people want to send me products, I'll review them, and if I find them useful, then I'll use them in the shows and in the videos and on my bench and that'll kind of self-promote them from the from the aspect of I basically didn't want it to be that somebody sent me a ten thousand dollar scope and and now I'm using that

because I've got some deal with them you you provide me with the hardware I use it I want it to be you send me this thing and if i think it's useful if i think that um if i'm going to use it if i like it if i think that customers and hobbyists and people on my site will will be able to get some information from my use of this then i'll use it did you have any ones that you um sent back yes and there was also circumstances where i did receive a product and i reviewed it and then afterwards i did i had no intention of using it so i returned it or passed it on to somebody else and uh that so tektronics has sent me equipment in the past some of it i've sent back to them to pass on to somebody else um fluke has sent me

equipment and in their case a lot of that's basically ended up in in the hands of yet another engineer or somebody else who then went on to review it from their their point of view or their perspective and the way that they use things like i think fluke sent me once a um a really nice multimeter combo kit that was a wireless system, a 3000 series wireless system. And it was great, but the kit was really built around an electrician. And I'm not really an electrician. I know how to do electrical work, but I thought it would fit better for somebody like that. So I have a colleague at work, his name's Matt Gilliland. And after I got done reviewing the device on my website, I passed it on to him. And then he actually does that kind of work every day. And so he also did his own review on it and shared his experiences with it,

and he continues to use it. And so that, you know, people see that and they see what he's using, and they say, hey, where'd you get that? And that works out. But how do you, going back to our particular, if and how we do something with this podcast, how do you get people to send you stuff for review? I mean, that first one, it sounded like they offered, but do you ask? Actually, the first time that a couple companies offered me product, I never really considered doing it. And then when I did, I thought, well, I can't just do this halfway. I can't expect people to come to me and offer me stuff. And I can't really review enough stuff if I'm not getting stuff. So yes, at one site kind of got the concept in my mind that I wanted to do reviews. I contacted marketing reps that I had seen through Twitter and other either like consumer trade shows and things and contacted them directly and said, hey, I've got this website. I've got this show. I want do product reviews you know do you have any hardware that you want

to send that you want to see reviewed from you know my perspective as a hobbyist and a design engineer in dealing with this type of demographic and so I you know I've got a few companies that I work with Tektronix and Fluke and Teledyne LeCroy, Salia, you said you were familiar with the logic analyzer. They came to one of the Parallax expos and were showing off the original logic analyzer. And it just happened to be that I was actually there filming one of the Savage Circuits TV episodes with another guy and said, hey, i'd love to review this thing and they sent me the eight channel and the 16 channel unit later and i reviewed them and then i continued to use them uh throughout tutorials and things on the website and so then that kind of spiraled off to they have

four new uh logic analyzer models that are out now, and I actually have those for review. You have all four? Yes. Okay, so I have the 16. I have the biggest one here. It's actually in my hands right now because it was sitting under my elbow. And it takes the USB 3, and I don't really like that. That means that I have to carry around the cables as well as the puck. Just the smaller ones, are they on the regular usb are you talking about the newer 16 channel or the original one

the newer yeah the new the newer 16 the pro i actually haven't gotten to that one in my review which is why it's not up um so i haven't actually run into that yet. Although a colleague, again, usually once I have hardware like that, I don't need four logic analyzers. As I've been going through them, I've been passing them on to my colleagues to provide their feedback as well, so I can kind of put up more information. And I have gotten some feedback on the eight yet, but we haven't gotten to the pro versions yet. Oh. I mean, I really like it. I'm waiting for the next software update. I'm hopeful that they will fix a few bugs,

but the whole thing is really nice. It's just, this one was bigger than I needed. I had an eight-channel straight logic analyzer before, and now I've got the oscilloscope slash logic analyzer. It's super powerful but it's also big and I don't need it yeah it's amazing how much the tools have evolved I mean when I started the the savage circuits tv episodes I had planned on doing scope and logic analyzer reviews and actually I did do the logic analyzer and the scope one was next but in that short

period of time the logic analyzers evolved to have scope functions, and the scopes that I have now all have built-in logic analyzers and even arbitrary waveform generators. So it's just amazing how you can get everything in one tool now. Yeah, well, it goes back to as soon as you've written your review, it's out of date because everything has changed again. Mm-hmm. again yep when you ask people for to send you things to review do you send them your like viewer numbers and have they

ever wanted uh editorial control the ones that wanted any kind of control or wanted me to say specific things i declined again i refuse to deal in that aspect. If someone wants to send me something, even if it's something to send back, I'm always willing to look at it and I'm always willing to give it a fair review. But there's too many people I've seen, I'm not going to mention any channel names, but I've seen too many channels where there's kind of a deal, some kind of arrangement with the provider, and that just doesn't give you an unbiased opinion of the product. I like to know who people are being paid by.

I'm up front with, we haven't monetized the podcast, we're considering it. I haven't monetized my blog, probably not considering that. I did get paid by Element 14 to write for them. And I get annoyed. I recently came across a neat little product and this guy told me all about it. And he was clearly very enthusiastic and he gave me his card and he said he worked for somewhere else. And it turns out he worked for a little company and now i want to like the little company and i can't because i feel like i got lied to from the first get-go yeah i've had that happen too actually um and i really wish companies wouldn't do that i don't care if you're being

paid by neat little widget company just be up front with it yeah, there's only, if you look at my short circuits videos, I've put a sponsor card at the beginning of each video. And I've mentioned the companies that I work with who more or less sponsor the show in the sense that they're providing in the website, in the sense that they're providing equipment for us. They're not trying to get us to do anything we don't want to do.

It's just, here's this, there's no expectations, review it, whatever, you know. And if they send me something newer and greater, all they ask is, would you send back the, some of them will say, will you send back the old unit so we can give that to somebody else or whatever. And that is the kind of marketing relationship that I like to see for a small website like myself, where I'm not trying to make any money. I'm just trying to share information and everything I do is free. So I'm not going to go out and pay or change the things that I say or do just to get something. Yeah. But this actually brings up another point. You aren't getting paid.

I mean, certainly not very much, given what you shared earlier. It certainly is not what you would be being paid if you were doing this work freelance or for someone else. Why do you do it? Because I like to. I mean, the only thing I do get paid for in the

interest of fairness and honesty is the magazine articles I write for Nuts and Volts. As long as they're projects that I'm writing on my own and not through Parallax, I get paid just the same as anybody else who writes an article for them. But everything else that I do is completely free. And usually the articles that are published in there have a home on the website. And don't make anything more than, like I said, if you're a guest coming to the site, you see some ads that that was supposed to help kind of pay for the traffic on the site that's outside. Right. But it doesn't really even do that, so it's not even worth mentioning. Yeah, sometimes listeners, when we link to hardware, I often link to Amazon, and they are affiliate links.

Some listeners actually use them, and it pays for about half of our hosting costs on a good month which is great i i don't mind paying for this but i i know why i do it i like to hear why other people are doing it too doing similar things i mean you're sharing knowledge this is something people would pay for if they had any sense yeah and i used to do design work i used to get paid to uh say somebody needed a prototype uh some of the things i used to do design work. I used to get paid to say somebody needed a prototype. Some of the things I used to do before I came to Parallax, I used to design custom audio amplifiers and audio video switching circuits, custom security alarms, things like that. And back then, someone would come to me and say,

here's what I need and how much would it cost to get this built. And what I would do is I would provide them with a prototype, a working prototype of what they wanted, and a complete bill of materials, sources, costs, the whole nine yards. And then at that point, they're basically on their own. I get paid one time for a working prototype and all the information to keep it going, and that's just the job.

It's done and over at that point. I sort of like projects like that. The proof of concepts, the science projects. I'm starting one of those. I'm excited. For me, it's a little different. They will get a prototype and a bill of materials, and then I'll work with them in a design firm

to just make sure that they are settled into a good path. But I like that little company doesn't quite know what they need. So they have the sense to go ask an expert what an expert would do, and then they can take that off and decide what they want to do. Yeah. Sometimes I get people that they have hardware guys that know how to put the hardware together, but they don't know the programming end of it. But I think the reason I stopped doing it was because when I was doing hardware designs, what would happen is I'd build a nice working prototype with chips and things that I was familiar with and had been working with for years. And then there was this stretch, I call it the five-year bad luck stretch, where I did these designs and I used parts from, mainly from National Semiconductor, but a few other ones as well. And then like six months

later, the chip went obsolete, like they discontinued it. Well, Chris, I think we are about out of time. I do want to say, you know, you mentioned your wife's illness and your own. I'm not very good at saying you have my sympathy, but I do feel it. So, I'm sure a lot of people are hoping that everything works out for your wife. Well, the interesting thing with her is she's like me in a slightly different aspect, which is that she likes to share things and that if somebody else has to go through what she's going through, she wants them to be able to know everything that she's gone through with her illness, so that other people that have relatives or friends that go through this, they can go and look and see what happens, what do you go through, what are the things you might run into, the bad things and the good.

As someone who once had a life-threatening illness and didn't know what to expect, thank you. I didn't have this one, but there were people who shared private details that it made my path easier. So I suspect she's making other people's paths easier. He's trying. Do you have any last thoughts you'd like to leave us with? I just wanted to say thanks for having me on the show.

And I look forward to downloading future shows and listening to them on my commute to work. Excellent. Did you like Chip's show? Yes, I listened to it, and I actually learned a lot from listening to Chip talking, because Chip works outside of the Rockland office, as do I typically, so we don't really see each other much at all, and I don't really know what's going on with the new Chip design. I learned more from listening to that than I would at Parallax. That's right.

The great communicator. All right. Well, thank you so much for joining us. You're welcome. Thanks for having me. Our guest has been Chris Savage, founder of Savage Circuits, which is savagecircuits.com. He's also an engineering tech at Parallax. And once again, thank you to Mason Holquist for introducing us to Chris Savage and the

nice folks at Parallax. As always, thank you to Christopher White for his loquaciousness in co-hosting and for producing, which is really great. If you'd like to say hello as a listener, hit the contact link on embedded.fm, which will always be valid. Or you can email us show at embedded.fm, which will be valid unless we get spam bombed. If you... Chris is shaking his head. which will be valid unless we get spam bombed. Chris is shaking his head. Did I mention I'm not really all that awake? Anyway, if you listeners would like a sticker, send us a note.

Tell us you told someone else about the show. It includes your address, and I'll send you a sticker when I get around to it, which is probably towards the end of February. In the meantime, thank you for listening. And I do have a final thought to leave you with this week, a very random one. This quote from Robert Moog. He said, Leon Theremin's original designs are elegant, ingenious, and effective. As electronics goes, the theremin is very simple, but there are so many subtleties hidden in the details of the design. It's like a great sonnet, or a painting, or a speech that is perfectly done on more than one level.