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Welcome, Kerry Scharfglass (@borgel)!
This episode is sponsored by Screaming Circuits, who are operating throughout the COVID-19 shutdown to serve medical customers (and normal customers too!). If you need priority service for a medical device related to Coronavirus, please let them know upon checkout. All other orders will be on a non-standard timeline guarantee (because of staffing, priority orders), but will have the same high quality assembly that Screaming Circuits is known for.
- Kerry was using Upverter for layout and switched to KiCad.
- He was designing a badge for DEF CON, which he did multiple years.
- The Dragonfly Badge was based upon Neal Stephenson’s Diamond Age
- Synchronizing clock over IR helped each piece of hardware coordinate patterns.
- Kerry has done two HDDG talks:
- From 1 to 100: Scaling and Selling a Personal Electronics Project’
- Design for Manufacturing
- There was another talk by Whitney Merrill about Badgelife that helped Chris understand people were building real hardware.
- Kerry Supercon talk about “medium scale”
- SnapEDA
- Talk with Nadya, Ben, and Zach
- Things learned from ‘small scale hardware war games’
- Photos of units, colorful diagrams
- “All the different things you use profit for”
- Moving from 4 layer to 6 layer
- Kerry’s first job out of school was at Lab126, the company that makes hardware for Amazon.
- At the time, they had released the Kindle and KindleFire.
- He was working on a prototype for what became the Echo.
- A (wearable) ring for Echo
- Wallwart that is cheap enough to throw into everything
- OMAP3 with DSP core
- Tracking COVID cases using phones
- Wake word on device
- Initial integration with Hue worked over UPnP
- Built with Yocto
- After Lab126, Kerry started working at Mindtribe. They were recently acquired by Accenture.
- Dockless scooter
- Speed to market as a design constraint
- How did it impact the firmware side of things?
- “If you can’t communicate with the client about what you’re doing, it doesn’t matter what you’re building at all”
- Whiteboarding as a skill in front of clients
- Mercilessly hack away at requirements
- Chris has dealt in the past with consultants who are rude (and doesn’t want to be like that).
- Kerry is now the Lead firmware engineer at Span.io. They are making power panels that can work better with solar and battery systems.
- Things that are different as a full time engineer vs a consultant: “I have all of the skin in the game instead of some of the skin”
- Moving into management vs moving to smaller company
- Storage + Solar
- The Powerwall doesn’t show up as a full system, it needs to be integrated by an electrician or similar.
- Industry is different than commercial
- “Designing for service”
- One customer is the home owner, one is the installer
- EEVblog videos about solar
- Changing wifi connection by the installer
- Altium to KiCad converter
- Hackaday articles
- Inner workings of a PCB
- Embedded file systems (LittleFS)
- Check out more about Span.io