#138 – An Interview with Ryan Brown – Effortless Equipment Extensibility

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Welcome, Ryan Brown of National Instruments!

• Ryan is the second guest from NI and actually introduced us to Matt Ettus, who was on the show previously.
• As a co-op, Ryan worked on the 6552 and the 6542.
• These days, Ryan is a lead on the FlexRIO platform, which allows people to build products onto of the NI ecosystem.
• Ryan’s products are mostly based on Xilinx FPGAs, which are now moving to the Vivado build platform.
• Dr. James Truchard sometimes stops by desks and asks engineers what they’re working on. He also gives keynotes most years at NI Week

• The connector selection is something that haunts you throughout the project.
• Sparkfun is now selling kits that includes an Arduino plus LabView.
• LabView is big/bulky because it has to simultaneously encompass people that want to dig deep into the hardware (listeners of this show) and people who just want to output a graph of whatever data their sensor is outputting.
• Because it’s such a large complex sysstem, design reviews are difficult but crucial to keep the system running.;
• Ryan visited and climbed the Greenbank telescope as part of his work!
• Aracebo is the large dish built into the ground that is featured in Goldeneye from the James Bond movies. Chris is more familiar from the N64 Goldeneye game.
• Austin is a town with lots of hardware: Dell, Freescale, AMD, Samsung and more!
• The SXSW Interactive festival was a couple weeks ago and had lots of focus on hardware startups.
• Ryan runs the ATXHW meetup group, which had a few events during SXSW.
• They take cues from the Ruby on Rails group in Austin, which is also very active.
• During the meetups, they do sessions about different hw aspects, such as Rapid Prototyping.
• One big name group out of Austin is Supermechanical, makers of the successful Kickstarter project, Twine. However, they started much smaller with projects that involved a wallet with an actuator to make it harder to open and a big QR code table.
• Others who regularly participate are Jack Minardi (who won the February YCombinator/Upverter hackathon for his glove project) and the Sapphire OS mesh network.
• No stranger to digging into projects, Ryan’s halloween project for Roomba costumes (see top picture and video below).

Halloween 2012 – Roomba Costumes with Synchronized LED RIngs from Ryan Brown on Vimeo.

• Ryan and a couple others are early members of the Austin TechShop, the first of which to be co-located with a big box hardware store (Lowe’s).
• National Instruments is also starting a pilot program with TechShop to provide hardware and LabView licenses at a reduced cost, as described in this video by Mark Hatch (of TS).
• Waterloo Labs is another group made up of NI’ers, who work on fun projects to promote STEM. They are well known for the iPhone driven car, the EyeMario System and most recently for real life Mario Cart.

• Ryan suggests a couple different BBQ for when visiting Austin (though he failed to mention the old standby of The Saltlick…which technically isn’t in Austin): Franklin on 11th, Stiles Switch and Manns Smokehouse BBQ (believe Chris, you haven’t lived until you’ve gotten the meat sweats from Texas BBQ).

Thanks again to Ryan for being on the show! It was great hearing about all his experiences and getting a taste for National Instruments. Don’t forget! If you’d like to take The Amp Hour listener survey for 2013 and put your name in to win a t-shirt, do so before we do the drawing next week! (multiple winners)