#435 – An Interview with Andreas Spiess

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Welcome, Andreas Spiess!

• You may know Andreas from his YouTube channel about connected devices and electronics, as “the guy with the Swiss accent”
• The content on the channel is for intermediate people
• A lot of his content is piecing things together
• His newest video shows how to use tire pressure monitoring systems for home brewing
• The advantage of age is having seen a lot and having “lots of hooks in the brain”
• Goethe wrote “I didn’t have enough time to make it this short“
• Andreas got started in the 70s, working on a forbidden fm transmitter
• CB radio wasn’t allowed in Switzerland at the time.
• He was in military service, where he learned Morse code.
• He later worked in Cameroon and Damascus for the International Committee of the Red Cross.
• After a degree in EE, he realized he made his hobby into his job.
• After an MBA, Andreas started doing product management.
• He also had a product that was a Morse code trainer. These were the topics of his first few videos on YouTube.
• “Every engineer should go into sales” to learn about things like sales pressure and budgeting.
• PhD in sales of investment goods.
• Using tech used in manufacturing (SPC) but applied to sales.
• First you had to find a process
• ERP systems
• Automation for buying parts
• Rules are important for automation
• “The most applied rule is ‘it depends’. This requires trained people which is expensive.”
• Even AI is finding out the rules
• “The most valuable world in the world is no”
• ESP32, ESP8266
• Rules based influenced on IoT interests
• First computer was TRS80
• James Bruton
• Ben Krasnow’s cookie machine
• Ben Krasnow’s video on laser traces.
• Multiple Dimensions is a company that Andreas helped get started. They make 3D PCBs, shown in the video above.
• Videos about antenna performance
• Influence of battery life on antenna
• Was first meant for PCBs and then later antennas were figured out
• Sleepwalking an ESP32
• Using both cores on the ESP32
• Building a reggae robot.
• AvE and This Old Tony
• Fleet management
• IoT App Story
• OTA updates
• Other things coming on the channel like BLE
• Micro (circuit) python vs arduino
• Will be doing a video with Damien George
• Benchmarks of micropython
• Check any of Andreas’ videos for contact info. He’s on FB and Twitter but mostly YouTube.