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Welcome back, Akiba of Freaklabs!
- Akiba was on the show back in April of 2015.
- Freaklabs is moving from a consultancy to a product company.
- One product that came out this year was a rice farm monitoring sensor node system. Developed in conjunction with the University of Tokyo.
- Uses single hop nodes with long range radios (couple kM)
- One aggregator node uses 3G to upload data.
- Software stack is Python flask
- Another sensor network project lets farmers know when there are boar (an invasive species) are caught in traps.
- Pigs in Space!
- For prototyping, Akiba normally uses Dirty PCBs/Seeed for getting PCBs manufactured.
- The Hackerfarm (located in Kamagowa) is still going strong!
- Akiba and Chris are both very big on apprenticeship.
- Chris has an issue when he was at the ECEDHA conference and company heads said they weren’t interested in practical education.
- Akiba’s sister founded Hackermoms in Oakland.
- The rise of HWstartups gives Akiba hope. He and Bunnie give tours to students from the MIT media lab.
- They visited a mannequin factory. Creepy!
- Quality factors in China require people on site to crack the whip. Akiba’s gf had a low quality product delivered to her because the quoting company subcontracted to an unproven smaller print house.
- Depression in technology can come from a lot of places. One of them is the seemingly endless treadmill of technology.
- In 2016, Akiba wants to create products that strike a chord with people. Not necessarily super technical products.
- One example is an electronic, “Choose Your Own Adventure” children’s book.
- Imposter syndrome, Hero culture and Ego are things we all have to deal with in technology.
- “Nose to the grindstone, head to the stars” ~ The Roots, “Sacrifice”
Happy 2016! Thank you to everyone for supporting and listening to the show!
I love hearing you guys talk about the “new” folks being spoiled by $3.00 wifi thanks to ESP8266. This is like 2nd generation of that feeling for me. I’m still amazed at how we are all spoiled by flash microcontrollers with JTAG debuggers as opposed to UV EPROM processors or worse, one-time-programmable processors! I agree, totally, though. And on the software side, I remember struggling to get I2C work on a processor, using a scope to watch the waveforms. Now, you just use an Arduino library and it works! We are spoiled by those who came before and left all this great technology for us to use.
Shoulders of giants and all that jazz 😀
What is a good way to get involved with people to collaborate with online?
I think there is a shortage of online resources that provide this service.
I live out in the country and I’m only slightly an asshole…
As Akiba said, this will probably take the form of forums or similar communities. The eevblog forum, for instance. Or a project site like Hackaday.io is good. It’s all about finding others, offering help, asking for help when its needed and following the community.
Those options make me feel inadequate and depressed…
Indeed most sites like those inevitably contain their own assholes or “jocks” as Akiba put it. Try making the most innocuous well-meaning post and find yourself belittled, flamed, etc by said individuals, who more often than not are held in high esteem by the forum membership because of their elite genius. Forum staff are reluctant to sanction said individuals for this type of behavior in fear it may make things ugly for their site/forum’s appeal given the person in question’s popularity.
Since you’re talking often about “theoretical education” here my thoughts about that:
Maybe we’re spoiled in Switzerland, but we basically have three levels of education, the highest being the university with the most theory and least practical training. So everybody has the choice of what kind of education to choose.
I’m totally with you, that some practical experience is crucial during education, but IMHO this is not the core competence of universities and should not be. It’s very nice if they provide facilities that every student can do some practical stuff. I think it’s much more efficient if everybody makes that experience on it’s own, with the benefit of freely choosing the topic.
And about math, physics and so on… of course it’s hard work to learn it, but I always was glad about every bit I knew, it really helps when getting into new fields. And the half life of the value of these basics is much longer than of more specific knowledge (I’m not talking about the half life in my brain, that’s another story…)
If of any interest:
ME with PhD, 36 years old
That’s a good point about the half life of knowledge. However, I think in any practical situation isn’t not about memorizing “turn this screw and THEN that one”, so much as, “Here are the steps we need to go through in order to figure something out.” Learning rigor is always important, including in a theoretical sense. However, the method for doing so (problem set, problem set, problem set) without any regard for the “why it matters” or “how it applies”, is rather frustrating to me.
The example I always give is from my signals class in college. I learned fourier transforms over the course of a month, as those are not an easy mathematical operation. It was only in the next month did I exclaim, “OH, it’s so we can see what frequencies are there!”. Yes, some of that was on me and my classmates for not getting it sooner. However, it was presented purely as math. Would it have really thrown the lesson plan off to pull out a spectrum analyzer and show, “Here’s what a sine wave looks like…now lets look at an AM and FM signal!”? I would have been much more interested in chunking through the math. The only thing that ended up getting me through was the promise of a good grade. That’s dumb.
Also, since you offer that you’re a PhD: Don’t underestimate survivorship bias (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias)
I was not in school to get a PhD, nor were many of my classmates. Another frustration I have is that my professors were teaching us all as though we were there to get one. I was there to become an engineer in the field, hopefully as fast as possible. I chose my school because of the co-op program, which ultimately gave me the practical knowledge I hoped for.
I feel that many profs say, “Well I got through this math taught in a similar way and I needed it ultimately for my research” while disregarding that the math without the practical ultimately scares off many students. The subject of whether that is a good or bad thing is another issue (ie. should students not willing to commit be allowed to do engineering?); I am simply pointing out that the often-used reason by professors of, “That’s how it’s always been done” isn’t a good one.
You are missing the point that Matthias is making: There are different end goals and therefore different paths to get there.
1) You want to get a PhD and learn about math and physics for math’s and physic’s sake. You need to get taught how math and the theory behind it works.
2) You want to be an engineer doing the hands on stuff. Math and physics are just a tool to get there.
In the US, there’s only one path: University/college. And 4 years is just barely enough to cram in the theory required by the PhDs.
In Switzerland (and Germany and Austria), there’s a separate track for the practical engineering professions. It sits between apprenticeship and full on college, and you can enter it after an apprentice ship (i.e. you learned a trade after middle school) or after high school (or like myself, after you dropped out of college because it was too theoretical.. or maybe I was just slacking :).
One important feature of this track is, that it’s almost always after on-the-job industry experience. You first do an apprenticeship to learn the practical aspects of your trade (e.g. soldering and circuit design for electronics, including some trade school for relevant basic math and physics). An alternative is a high school degree and a few years of work in the industry. Then, if you want to graduate from technician to engineer, you go to a “Fachhochschule” to dive deeper into the advanced topics (incl. Fourier). After Fachhochschule you even can go to university if you really fancy a PhD.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fachhochschule
The point being: The university/college education in its current form has its place and value. It’s the secondary path that’s sorely missing.
Too right, I misinterpreted the comment. Thank you for the link, I never would have found that word on my own 🙂
From the other side – someone who hires engineers.
I don’t always see the formal college component to be the most useful part of a fresh graduate’s education. Certainly it varies with the degree and curriculum, and I have a bias toward software, but what I usually see is that the formal part is only a foundation. It gives knowledge and tools, but not a lot of what’s necessary to succeed.
The people that get hired are the ones that fill in the blanks with their own after-hours work. They build web sites, apps, custom hardware, and such. They explore and learn about real world hardware and software, either on their own, or in clubs. They hack and build whenever they can.
One particular software developer candidate comes to mind. He was a brilliant kid, with a wealth of knowledge, but none of it practical. He had been exposed to Python briefly in his degree program, but in his words, never learned to program. If he had gone beyond his classes and learned some real skills, he likely would have gotten the job. I’m not sure it ever occurred to him to do more than what came with the degree program.
The people I’ve hired are the ones with imagination, creativity, and a thirst for knowledge. They were never satisfied with the education they got and built on it on their own. They know, or learned, how to self-learn. A college education is important. In general, I don’t think an apprenticeship alone is enough either. With both routes, the students attitude and desire to explore outside of the degree or apprenticeship program will be a major factor in their future success.
My view of education is that if you’re studying for a PhD then you can deal with the ‘language’ inherent to that discipline and are able to deal with a high degree of abstract knowledge. So if you’re studying literature or art you’ll be more than a little familiar with convoluted philosophy (of which I know little), In our discipline its maths. I’ m grateful for studying maths as part of my electronics degree though was frustrated by the lack of practical work. In fact, it actually put me off the subject for years but now, with all the new tech around and the ability to do so much stuff via a laptop, its a golden age to tinker with stuff and if I want to have a go at some DSP I know that I wont be put off as much as some folk might. Remember, degrees are where they try to teach you lots of stuff very quickly; you pick what you need out of the ‘scattergun’ approach.
I totally agree that “that’s how it’s always been done” is not a good reason. It’s symptomatic about what is wrong with U.S. engineering education. I’ve had a similar experience in that much of my training was theoretical with no connection to the real-world. Signals & systems/DSP is probably the best example. Also, name a bsee program in the u.s. that actually teaches folks how to create hardware from idea to schematic to pcb layout to gerber to real hw. My issue with U.S. engineering is that there is not enough practical training to show why the theoretical is important. Imho, it is the duty of universities to teach this. There is no time to ‘learn on your own’. Universities are supposed to be the keepers of info, all info. so, this should include the practical and theoretical.
bernie
bsee and pe
Another more specific example I like to give about what is wrong with engineering education is my poles and zeros example. After about a month or so learning about poles and zeros for filter design, one of us in class asked the prof “so, how do we add just one one or more poles in this opamp circuit
? The professor couldn’t answer and just went back to writing even more math on the blackboard.
I always look forward to Chris/Dave’s (& other contributors) voices each week – an Hour of good-natured Nerd-Talk : ) – In between the fun banter, I always learn one or two things…- Hey, Keep it Up! : )
You might have heard the story of the Physics Professor trying to explain Logarithms to the class via referral to Human hearing:
“You see this pin I’m holding between my fingers?”
“I’m going to drop it on the desk here in a moment; who can estimate the human eardrum’s movement in respose to that sound?”
– Various hands go up, & one volunteers: “A millionth of an inch??”
“A fair guess…”
“But, – so, if I drop a million pins on the desk – does the eardrum move an inch?”
Awesome show. Akiba – you are my personal hero! Such an attitude towards everything, you must be a great human being!
Do you have a link for the microscope you talked about? Being able to take pictures up close of defects or features on a board sounds like a wonderful superpower, and I want one.
thanks so much for addressing depression and impostor syndrome, two subjects I struggle with often
Great motivational Amp Hour. Being between work,clients and jobs and not sure of the next direction this was really good to listen to.