#461 – An Interview with Jonathan Georgino

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Welcome, Jonathan Georgino of Binho!

• The Binho is a USB host adapter targeted at manufacturing floors, but also can help people quickly talk to devices using i2c, serial, SPI and GPIO.
• There are a couple of options out there for manufacturing: Some are robust and expensive, others are hobbyist
• Using scripts and adapters for production line programming
• Career started at GE in St Marys, working on a CAN sensors
• Got a Saleae logic analyzer, wrote to Mark and Joe, went to go work with them.
• Mark and Joe were on episode 237 of The Amp Hour
• Helped to design the Logic 8, 8 pro and 16.
• Jonathan took away that products should be a pleasure to use, easy to understand
• Making it accessible in multiple ways
• Mark recently talked to Limor about the Saleae
• After Saleae, Jonathan went to go work at the Wonder Workshop (WW)
• Other consumer Robot startups having a hard time. We talked about Anki on episode 441.
• WW focuses on the educational market, where you need to be prepared for 1 year sales cycle and need a curriculum for the teachers who will be using it.
• Blockly or Scratch to program the robots
• Variables are tough for kids to understand (or big kids, like Chris).
• When designing for the educational market, need to design for robustness and compliance testing
• Testing comes out of the IEC standards, with different ones for each country.
• Partnered with toy manufacturer in China to make the robots.
• Jonathan was only EE up until production
• Dash has 12 different PCBs, with one that has 3 processors and 2 SPI flashes on board.
• Blockly is an open source project from Google
• “Changing careers is the best way to learn and grow”
• After WW, Jonathan moved to Zola, who are doing off grid for African countries.
• He got to visit Tanzania and see the product in action. There wasn’t as much needed on the EE side of things.
• Then he joined Pi, now Spansive
• They were working on a wireless charging device using A4WP, banking on new phones adapting it as a standard (it wasn’t)
• The experience in China manufacturing was that there are devices available but they are low cost and have janky UI.
• Most popular on the market are from Total Phase
• Can connect to Binho using Python API or any application that can pass in ASCII characters
• Can hook into any of the existing tools
• Some people are using a Raspberry Pi for testing
• Under the hood it’s an m0, with protection for overcurrent
• Also have a GUI
• Built in Xojo to be cross platform
• Use pip to install binho host adapter
• Jonathan advises you to put your pins onto the board the first time your board is made
• Continuous integration for firmware
• Rigol has python libraries, as does the Saleae. These might be python on top of GPIB.
• Check out Jonathan’s personal site and the Binho site.