#295 – An Interview with Omer Kilic

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Welcome, Omer Kilic (@OmerK)

• Omer has an academic background. His thesis started off being about FPGAs.Towards the tail-end of his research, he started exploring Erlang for embedded devices.
• He programs using Erlang, which was created by former mobile phone giant Ericksson (device making has tailed off, they still do network infrastructure).
• They had a phone called the T28 that was well designed.
• Erlang can uses the “actor model” of concurrency, which maps really well into the hardware domain. It’s used for the backend of apps like WhatsApp. More info at http://www.erlang-embedded.com/
• Chris had spend the day at the London Science Museum. It was fantastic!
• Omer has worked with a few hardware companies in the past, including doing work on large manufacturing operations in China.
• Now Omer is the CTO and Chief Hacker at Den Automation.
• Nothing replaces being able to sit next to each other during development.
• While in China last time, Omer tried talking to big semi with mixed results. It was easier to get a few chips in the market as an experiment.
  
  
• Omer has talked about access to chips in the past at OSHUG.
• The main problem with intelligent devices is interoperability. How do you get multiple devices to talk to one another without loads of software?
• Setting standards aren’t the answer, there was a relevant XKCD about that very topic.
• Usually it’s companies saying “use ours!” and this only rarely actually works out in the end (like Motorola with SPI)
• The National Microelectronics Institute (NMI) will host a talk in May, falongside BCS (British Computing Society) and OSHUG. The event is called the NMI Open Source Conference.
• Open source can be something people hide behind and use as an excuse for mediocrity in their products.
• The company was started by Yasser, now only 20ish years old! They raised 500K of seed funding
• We put a chip in it!
• The Internet of Shit is a great novelty account. They recently tweeted about the stats of people planning to use Javascript in their devices.
• The Den Automation devices will be a connected wall switch and socket, along with a couple of auxiliary helper devices. Sockets in the UK have switches on them as well. At first they will only be making UK based devices.
• Each socket/plug will have power consumption monitoring and also will allow the user to “label” which device is plugged into it.
• The problem is that they are building the entire socket/switch from scratch. This means lots of regulatory hurdles. The British standards must be passed, as well as CE for RF.
• The problem with dynamic languages (like Javascript) is the overhead required if it is to be run on each device.
• Den already is utilizing a PLM because of the impending regulation process.
• The decision to move production to China should not be taken lightly. There was a Wired UK series on production there.
• The initial funding for the project was raised on Seedrs, they are are raising a second round now.
• See more about the project at http://getden.co.uk/
• Omer has given another talk about IOT called “The IOT Hardware Kerfuffle“

Many thanks to Omer for talking about the connected device market and doing manufacturing with a small team! It turned into a constructive conversation about getting products to market.