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Welcome Akbar Dhanaliwala, Founder and CEO of Lager Data!
- Akbar has been doing 15 years of embedded systems
- He has a Mech E background and attended Stanford engineering for grad school.
- Solar panel robot cleaner
- They had evisioned a device that enabled wireless debug with JLink
- JLink with RPi
- Dev Ops
- War stories
- Various types of testing
- Consulting right after school via his consultancy Pocobor
- One of their first customers was Solar City (later purchased by Tesla).
- Wireless system using ZigBee to monitor panels and inverters. The bridge in the inverter, the gateway is in the house. Some are still deployed in the field.
- They were the “low bid”, which means they didn’t work for much as consultants (but it lead to many other gigs)
- Testing Zigbee by walking down the block
- Pocobor – It’s “Robocop spelled backwards”
- Another company was Juul when they were still called Plume
- They had an office in Dogpatch (in SF)
- Being a technology center, it lead to many interesting gigs
- Stanford Junior car (VW)
- Testing big stuff
- Why did Pocobor end?
- Minna was a spinoff in the sex toy industry in 2009. They are still around.
- Akbar moved to NYC and joined a startup called Ringly with a friend who started the company
- They got the product to market, a device that indicates when you have new messages on your phone without looking at a screen
- Required a complex flex board interally because it was such a small, odd form factor in a ring.
- Burned out after a lot of time in China
- Step tracking in the ring using algorithm development (difficult because the hand does a lot of other movements than just walking)
- Getting data out was really hard because you couldn’t just plug in a JLink
- No automation or regression testing
- Updates could break OTA DFU
- ANCS protocol
- All of his experiences inspired Lager Data
- CI/CD
- Runs the test when you push the code
- IDE dependent tools
- Gateway
- Debug probe built in
- Wrapper tools
- Lager command line makes it easier to script actions
- Dockerized build environments
- Gateway has IO you can access via the command line
- Unity test framework
- Quaternions
- Writing test data
- Lager gdb server
- 3rd party build
- GitHub actions
- TDD – test driven development
- System test
- Run python scripts on gateway
- Past guest Jason Huggins (Tapster) also talked about the importance of testing
- Akbar recommends implementing a simple shell in embedded projects
- Testing over UART
- For more info or to sign for for a demo, check out lagerdata.com
Great interview and love having the outline! I have a similar war story of testing a wireless router I was developing in my truck with a mag mount antenna trying to get close to an AT&T Tower by parking in a school parking lot. Not long before a police car was parked behind me.