Dave: Welcome to the Amp Hour.  I’m Dave Jones of the EEV blog.
Chris:  And I’m Chris Gammell of Contextual Electronics.
Forrest:  I’m Forrest Mims I live in Texas, I write books and do science.
Chris:  Yeah science!
Dave:  Oh my goodness Forrest Mims.  Come on Chris we have to do it…
Chris & Dave:  We are not worthy, we are not worthy!!
Dave:  For you young whippersnappers out there i.e. anyone post the internet era out there.
Chris:  Even still it’s not like … people would still know.
Dave:  People would still get his books …We’re talking the most prolific electronics author on the planet I believe with 7 million books sold.  Absolutely crazy – dating back to the 70s when I was doing electronics, when I was a boy.  Everyone knows Forrest Mims, the electronics author but he’s so much more than that as we will get into, so thank you very much for joining us Forrest.
Forrest: Well I’m glad to be here.
Dave:  And where are you from?
Forrest:  I live in Texas, in a small town called Seguin in a rural site.  We live on some acreage here, a lot of trees a little creek and place to do my scientific measurements in a field.
Chris: That’s awesome.  So in emailing with Forrest I realized I met my wife I think less than 30 miles from where he lives which is totally crazy.
Forrest: That’s right.
Chris: Texas days, I miss Texas some days.  Especially when it gets like today in Cleveland it’s gross…
Dave:  Have you always lived in Texas?
Forrest:  Well I was born in Texas but I’ve lived in many states and met my wife in New Mexico after coming back from Vietnam and then came back to Texas.
Dave:  Right.  Oh there’s so many things we’ve got to talk about.  I don’t know how we are going to fit it all in one show.
Chris:  How about this.  Forrest where would you like us to start?  Do you want to go backwards in time or do you want to go forwards in time.
Forrest: Lets start at the beginning.
Dave:  Yeah. How did you get into electronics?  This is an electronics show so we don’t necessarily care about your troubled childhood or something if you had one.
Laughter
Dave: Sorry about that.
Chris:  That’s a nice assumption Dave…
Forrest:  The beginning was when I was eleven years old building a soapbox racer which had a headlight made from a PR13 incandescent light powered by a 6v battery and when I turned the light off it would run down the battery.  I didn’t realize the on/off switch had to be in series with the light.
Laughter
Forrest:  I put it in parallel with the light so I figured that out when the bent nail I was using for a switch became warm.  I suddenly had the enlightenment that I had the switch hooked up incorrectly.  That began my electronics career.
Dave: That’s brilliant.
Chris:  It’s like the start of an epic journey.
Forrest: It was and my father build a crystal radio set for my brother and me and it actually worked so I began building small radios.  I learned that the capacitor was not called the capacitator it was called the capacitor and I learned that I didn’t like vacuum tubes and so I stuck with semi conductor diodes.  Then in 1957 for Christmas that year, I was 13.  My dad was serving in Korea and my mother let me select for Christmas an order of parts from Lafayette Radio and those were the parts to build my first one transistor radio and I snuck in the closet and actually touched the transistor before Christmas day.
Laughter
Dave: Nice.  Now this is rather bizarre, you’re talking late 1950s here and you didn’t like tubes? 0:04:02.4
Forrest:  Oh no of course not, tubes were …. When I went to college in 1965 when I was a senior everybody kept saying I should have majored in electronics because of all the work I was doing in my dorm room.  So I finally decided to walk over to the electrical engineering building one day and I stood by the door and looked at some of my class mates in this class and there were all these equations on the board which made no sense to me and they were working with vacuum tube breadboard circuits on their lab bench.  I went back to my dorm room where I was working with integrated circuits and ultra sophisticated light emitting diodes!
Chris: Oh man
Dave: Brilliant!
Forrest: Why would I want to use vacuum tubes?
Dave:  Even in the 50s that’s fantastic I thought the …
Forrest: 60s
Dave:  60s right 65.  well that’s right that’s when in Australia 1965 Electronics Australia which I have had my projects published in that’s when they changed their name from Radio and TV Hobbies to Electronics Australia.  So that’s when the electronics revolution took off then maybe?
Forrest:  Yeah the very beginning of it and hobbyist electronics really began to come to it’s full fruition in the late 60s early 70s.
Dave:  Right and when was your first article published?
Forrest:  Good question, ok I was building light flashers.  Small light transistorized light flashers, 2 transistors a capacitor resistor a pot and a small incandescent bulb and I was putting them in small rockets. I designed a new kind of rocket control system back in high school and I was building these in college and I was even flying them in Vietnam and I needed a way to track them so I could watch the movements of the rockets at night.  One night I launched it 21 times and photographically recorded it every flight.
Chris:  Oh wow
Forrest:  I was asked to launch one of these at a model rocket meeting at Portales New Mexico State university and the editor of Model Rocketry Magazine George Flynn was there and he said ‘could you write an article for my magazine on how to build one of these light flashers?’ and I said sure.  I didn’t realize he was going to pay me $93.50 for that article.
Dave: That was a lot in those days!
Forrest: Well it was not only a lot but it was my first freelance article and I told my wife and said I’m going to quit the air force when I finish my 4 years and become a freelance write.  So that’s how I got started.
Dave: Wow.
Chris: I was reading on your wiki page about you exploits when you were overseas.. What was it you were in Vietnam and you were launching a rocket at a base or something and you got into trouble for that, what was that story?
Forrest:  Oh golly I got into trouble a couple of times.  That was at Tan Son Nhut Airforce base right next to Saigon and I was …Some time we are very naive when we were younger.  I would go riding through Saigon with rockets strapped to the back of my little motorbike.  Assuming everybody knew they were harmless.
Chris: Of course!
Dave: Right!
Forrest: They didn’t know they were.
Chris: It’s a science experiment, it’s a science experiment!
Forrest: So I would launch these out of the Sholong race track which was an abandoned race track, abandoned during the war at least and one day we were launching rockets, I saw we because all these Vietnamese kids would come out an watch.  They would help me recover the rockets from inside the racetrack and suddenly an army helicopter, a Huey zoomed in with 50 caliber machine guns pointed straight at us and I would take off my shirt and start waving my shirt.  I told the kids to get away.  I’d just assumed they were going to kill me on the spot and they lifted up and came right over me, everything blew away.  They looked at me and I kept waving an everything and they left but I heard more about that later from my bosses where I worked in the intelligence office.
Chris:  That must have been a heart race moment. 0:07:54.1
Forrest: Another time I was launching from the roof of my apartment.  I put a map of how to get to my apartment on this rocket offering a reward for it’s return and I launched the rocket then all of a sudden military police show up at the bottom of where I … I lived right off the base gate and the military police showed up as I was  going downstairs to look for my rocket and they said.  get back in your place the base is under attack, under rocket attack.  So I went back to my room and I remembered I had put my map to my house on that rocket.  So I snuck out anyway and went looking for it I never did find it.
Chris: No one else did apparently either right cause you’re here telling us?
Forrest: Apparently not! I’m glad for that.
Laughter
Chris & Dave: Wow
Dave: That’s a story and a half, I don’t think we’ve heard one like that Chris.
Forrest: Those rocket launch experiences LED to something much bigger because my friend Ed Roberts also at the Air Force weapons lab he and I had been discussing, organizing a company to sell things through Popular Electronics magazine.  We never could hit on a formula that both of us could agree to.  We talked about everything from electronic abacus to an op amp analog computer like I’d been building in High School and that Ed was very interested in but when I got that article published in model rocketry he was really excited.  He said ‘this is it, this is what we can do’ and so we started a little company Micro Instrumentation Telemetry systems to build those light flashers as well as fault rocket transmitters and that company MITS went onto do much bigger and greater things.
Dave:  Oh yes folks, if the name rings a bell yes it is the Altair, the Ed Roberts of Altair fame so you are co-founder of MITS?
Forrest: Ed and I founded the company with Stan Kegel and Bob Zeller in September of 1969 in Ed’s kitchen.
Chris: Where all good companies are founded right.. garages, kitchens..
Forrest: Absolutely.  Well the garage became where we built all the circuitry.  Those guys were watching Star Trek, I was writing the manuals and everything. Years later Paul Allen .. Paul Allen and Bill gates came to Albuquerque to build to write software for the Altair.  In 2006 Paul donated money to the New Mexico museum of Natural History and Science for a new wing to the museum celebrating the beginning of the personal computer era in New Mexico so there’s really really neat exhibits of Paul’s personal collection of mini rare computer artifacts.
Dave: Oh I had no idea!
Forrest: There’s a picture of my wife typing the manual for the first MITS transmitter then the rocket I built to launch the transmitter is sitting right next to the photograph of my wife in the museum.
Chris: That’s so cool.
Forrest: It’s a kick to see that.
Chris: Wow do you get back out to New Mexico much?
Forrest: We try to go out once a year, my wife still has relatives there.
Chris: Great that’s awesome.
Dave: So Ed ended up buying you guys out before the Altair happened?  How did that come about? 0:11:06.7
Forrest: We were doing very poorly we only sold a few hundred of these telemetry kits and then we moved them to building various other things and then Ed wanted to get into building electronic calculators and Stan and I thought that just would not work it would fail…
Dave: Why was that?
Forrest: We didn’t think it would work because the Japanese were already beginning to bring out inexpensive calculators
Dave: Right and it didn’t last long did it?  He was successful with the calculators but I think it was very briefly.
Forrest: It was very successful for about a year or so I wrote the manuals for those first calculators and he would pay me in equipment.  We sold out to Ed but we were still all buddies, I was doing my thing becoming a writer and Stan was doing his thing he was still a consultant so I wrote the manuals for the early calculators.  When he did the computer he called me over to the office one night and I was only four blocks away so I got on the bicycle and rode over there and he went into the shop there at MITS and he said ‘what do ya think?’ and he’s pointing at this funny looking blue box on the workbench with rows of switches and lights.  He said ‘how well do you think it will sell?’ He told me what it was and I said ‘Ed based on past experience maybe a few hundred at most’.  He looked sad and I felt bad later that I had been so pessimistic and they sold over 5000.
Chris: See now what if that was what motivated him even more to push it, that’s what really pushed it over the edge – you never know.
Forrest: What really motivated the whole thing was Popular Electronics Magazine.  I had 3 columns in Popular Electronics all at the same time every month and that was really my full time work.  So Les Solomon the technical editor desperately wanted a computer project to keep up with Larry Steckler’s magazine Radio Electronics.  They had published some work in 1974, a 4 bit microcomputer but it didn’t take off and so they wanted an 8 bit machine and them when Ed came up with the Altair it was only natural for Les to become really involved in that.  I’d introduced him to Ed when he came out to Albuquerque I’d designed with Ed and Bob a light wave transmission system called the Optocomm. Transmitted your voice over an infrared beam of light.  We put that in popular electronics both as a cover story and a tutorial about light emitting diodes and a construction article about the project.  So we had a strong connection with Popular Electronics and that’s what made the Altair successful.  In fact Paul Allen saw that magazine in Harvard Square and took it to Bill Gates and that’s how it all began.
Dave: So is there any truth to the rumor that the actual box that was on the front cover is actually fake because the real prototype was lost in transit?
Forrest: Yes it was lost in transit.
Dave: On a train? It was lost on a train or something?
Forrest: I don’t remember how, I have no idea how Ed shipped it all I know is it never made it.
Dave: The worlds first, the world’s first home computer was basically lost in transit.  Laughter
Forrest: YeahDave: And so they agreed to publish a fake box with LEDs just ….
Forrest: it was kind of an emergency because the article was already prepared and edited and ready to go and they needed a cover shot so sometimes strange things happen.
Dave: Had Les Solomon seen the working prototype or did he just trust you that it worked.
Forrest: I don’t think he saw it and I did not write the popular electronics article Ed did with Bill Yates, the EE guy who worked with Ed.  The names are the same except Bill’s starts with a Y and Gates starts with  G, they wrote that article for Popular Electronics.
Dave:  And it was never recovered?  The world’s first … 0:15:18.9
Forrest: I talked to Ed about that a couple of times, no it was never recovered.
Dave: Wow, so it’s still sitting out there or it’s sitting in a landfill.  How valuable would that sucker be if it turned up?
Chris: it sounds like a trade show mishap almost where it’s like at the last minute, the night before … oh well its (inaudible) blink. Although I’m sure blinking was more impressive back then.  I’m actually interested in your interest in LEDS to get started.  I can only imagine that they must have been incredibly expensive to start with.
Forrest: they were and when I learned about LEDS the first time, at Texas A&M I was a junior.  I was walking across this particular street, I remember it like it was yesterday.  Walked over to the library, the electronics library was in the wing of one of the buildings it wasn’t in the library.  Picked up electronics magazine and read about infra red light emitting diodes and it just captivated me.  Texas Instruments at the time was just north of Dallas, Richardson Texas they were making these high power infrared LEDs, 900 nanometer LEDs out of gallium arsenide.  I just had to have one. I contacted TI and I contacted a scientist called Ed Bonin, he had a PhD.  I hitchhiked up to A&M to meet with him.  By the way you don’t want to hitchhike to Dallas.
Dave: Hitchhiked! I was going to say.
Forrest: That was way back then, you especially don’t want to do it… it’s not very safe.  I go into Dr Bonin’s office and he shows me a little small, about the size of a lipstick tube, flashlight with a red LED and it just completely captured me.  I’ve got to have one of those, I’ve got to build one of these.  We talked about laser diodes TI was in the process of trying to build those, GE had already built one, MIT had already built one.  Then he showed me these infrared diodes and the reason they had an external quantum efficiency of 80% because they were built in a dome, the semiconductor was not a flat die like a sandwich it was built as a dome, grounded to a dome.  So the internal light always met the surface of the proper escape angle, it wasn’t reflected back in.
Chris & Dave: Oh wow, awesome.
Chris: That sounds expensive.
Dave: It does and they haven’t made them like that since have they?
Oh no, no, well they tried to simulate it with epoxy those diodes cost $365 back then and of course I couldn’t afford one.  That was in 1966 dollars.
Chris: That’s like 10 articles.
Forrest: Dr Bonin said, I wrote him a letter with a proposal, he said if you can send me the circuit you plan to use with this, if it works, I will send you a sample.  So I built a circuit, I didn’t know if it would work I mailed it to him and he writes me back and he said it works and he said I’m going to send you three infra red LEDs.
Chris: Score. That’s like 1000 dollars!
Forrest: Those are the LEDs I was working with I went to that EE class when I decided that I didn’t want to major in electronics.
Chris: Ahhh like leaving you suckers behind   got some sweet gear.
Dave: You and your damn vacuum tubes!
Forrest: I was able to build and infra red travel light for the blind using one of those and that’s what kicked off my electronics career, although I built an analog computer in high school that translated 20 words of Russian into English that’s another project but the miniaturization that was required to build this travel aid for the blind, that’s what really kicked off my electronics career.
Chris: Can you explain that project a little bit, I read a little bit about it maybe for people listening.
Forrest: The travel aid or the computer?
Chris: Well both are good but the travel aid to start with.
Forrest: the travel aid was installed in a 3in x 1in x 1in clear plastic box, the LED was mounted in a small incandescent light assembly, but instead of the incandescent light it had the LED with a red glass lens and then the front of the box was a silicon solar cell with an aluminum, corrugated collimator about 1/4 inch thick in front of it to help block sunlight. That went to a hearing aid amplifier that I had salvaged from a hearing aid I got from a hearing aid dealer and that went to an earphone.  The LED was pulse powered so it’s a fairly high 50mwatt pulses and it could detect objects up to 12 feet.  The closer you got the louder the signal.
Chris: Oh wow like sonar but for light obviously.
Forrest: Right very primitive but I tested this with several dozen blind people, adults and children in various blind school and I tested it in Vietnam at two different schools and it worked like a charm but I couldn’t get a manufacturer and the key reason was liability.  Hearing aid companies would say nobody is going to sue us if our hearing aid wearer falls into a hole, but if he is also wearing our travel aid and happens to be blind we’re going to get sued. 0:20:27.7
Chris: I thought lawyers had gotten worse over the years that sounds like …
Forrest: I was very sad that wasn’t commercialized.
Chris:  That’s a darn shame.
Forrest: I eventually miniaturized after I finished the air force, I miniaturized it into two small 3 eights inch diameter brass tubes that fit on sunglasses and there was no earphone cord.  The earphone was a hearing aid earphone inside a brass tube with a clear plastic tube that went down into your ear.
Dave: Brilliant.  Have you ever had your own company selling your own kits or have you always primarily just been an author?
Forrest: Well at MITS we sold kits at MITs.
Dave: of course but after MITS?
Forrest: Well I linked up with a small company that sell the Marvelous Martian Music Machine which is a metal box with a potentiometer that made all sorts of strange sounds and I got that on the Johnny Carson show but it didn’t help sales. It made my hometown famous but it didn’t sell many kits.
Chris: I didn’t hear that story, it was on the Johnny Carson show that’s crazy.
Dave: we’ll have to add that story to the Wikipedia page.
Laughter
Chris: were you on the show as well or just the box?
Forrest: I was doing a book tour in Los Angeles for my book Solar Connections and the promoter took me to the Johnny Carson producers but I was too boring but they thought my little machine was really exciting.  That’s what they told the book agent, she said you’re not going to make it but your machine will.
Chris: Oh man.
Dave: I was reading somewhere that I’m not sure what date it was but you were getting $400 per article for popular electronics, that seems like an awful lot cause I remember I was barely paid that in the late 80’s and 90’s for my articles in electronics Australia.  You were earing good money being an author or a contributor to the books and magazines.
Forrest: I became full time… I left the air force in 1970 as a captain.  I went to work as a parking lot attendant at the local airport and I told my wife after one year I will be a full time freelancer.  Meanwhile my buddies from the air force were in disbelief that I was in working at the Air force weapons lab at the High Powered Laser Division.  They couldn’t believe I had quit the service to work in a parking lot for 1/4 the money.  People would come through at night some of them drunk and throw their money at you; it was a pretty demeaning job.  But I wrote my first book in that parking lot booth.
Dave: Great
Forrest: But a year went by and I wasn’t making enough money and one night the security guard went bezerk and pointed a .45 at me and I quit the next morning.  They fired the fella but I was afraid he might drive and shoot me.  He was mentally off.  So I had to depend on God and what little electronics knowledge I had and we survived.  I’ve been a full time freelance writer ever since.
Dave: So you could actually make a full time living out of the electronics magazines?
Forrest: Yeah well that and the books.  I wasn’t wealthy but it paid the bills and I was … many many times we were at the edge.  We’d sit there at the dinner table and pray for some income to pay the bills and the next day a check would arrive.  That went on for about 3 years.
Chris: Many people know you from the RadioShack books can you take us from that tough point of making it as a full time author to actually starting to work for the RadioShack and getting all those books published or maybe even just the first publication. 0:24:27.3
Forrest: Good question.  The first books I wrote were on laser diodes and light emitting diodes.  I wrote the first 2 books on LEDS and the first book on diode lasers with a fella named Campbell.  Those books were published by Howard Sams and CO.  Then I wrote a book on opto electronics.  Somewhere in that series of books the editor at Sams said we’re doing books for RadioShack and they contacted me and said could you write one of these books, so I wrote my first project book.  Now these were typeset books these were not the hand lettered series and this went on. I wrote 16 I believe of those books.  Then at some point RadioShack calls me in and they say why do we need to deal with the publisher you can make a lot more money dealing directly with us and you be the author and publisher.  We came up with a formula of writing a book that would be hand lettered and that’s another story in itself.  That was an experiment that succeeded.  So I began writing Engineers Notebook, which was 128 pages of projects both analog and digital both integrated and circuits and it just went from there.
Dave: I have it right here in front of me.  Printed in 1979.
Forrest: That book sold several hundred thousand copies and then I met with my editor, Dave Gunzell, fantastic technical editor.  He was the one who had the idea for doing hand lettered books and he got the idea from my lab notebooks.  I would keep detailed notes of everything I had done in science and he was one of my witnesses.  One day he was looking at that and said ‘why can’t you do a book like this?’ because I would print kind of neatly and all that and that’s how that began. And so then it came time to do a generic book of introducing the customers to electronics and I suggested calling it ‘Getting Started in Electronics’ they said ‘Great’ they wanted a hand lettered book 128 pages as usual and I wrote that book in 58 days.  Tested every circuit four times, I tested every circuit four times because when you build the circuit and you rebuild it when you’re looking at the drawing you made you make shortcuts because you’re so used to building it over and over again you don’t follow the drawing you made so I would make sure I followed exactly what I made.  That book was published with only 2 minor errors in it, where some of the earlier books had more errors than that.  That book has sold 1.4 million copies legally and I hate to say this on your program it’s given away free by pirates all over the web, really eating into out income.  That’s what the internet has become.
Dave: That sucks.
Forrest: Distributes all my books for free and meanwhile my income is going progressively lower and lower.
Chris: Right over time as the royalties drop right?
Forrest: Yup
Chris: So what did you say that sold 4 million copies of that sold?
Forrest: No that sold 1.4 million copies legitimately sold.  There was a company, I wont tell you where but there a company in another country that has sold 40, 000 copies of it illegally.  The author just copied the whole book and translated it into that language and they sold all these books not realizing that the book was totally plagiarized.  They had a very friendly attorney, they reached an agreement to pay me a 15% royalty, they did that and there’s one more check to come and they are going to stop using my plagiarized book.
Chris: Oh man that’s crazy.  I was reading about the total number of books though and the Wiki page at least said there was about 36 total books.  There was that one big one what was the distribution of the other books?  Were there other top sellers beyond that one, the main one?
Forrest: The small mini notebooks sold in the many hundreds of thousands of copies each and then they were bound into 4 books into one volume, to make a four volume set of sixteen mini notebooks and I can’t really tell you how many they sold.  I haven’t kept up with the total sales, that 7.1 or 7.2 million copies that’s just RadioShack books that’s not all the other books.
Chris: Wow that’s crazy.
Dave: Oh no…How many mistakes would you make?
Forrest: Most of them were very trivial.  I don’t want any errors in a book and so the mini notebooks had hardly any errors because of that policy of rebuilding every circuit four times from scratch.  The point I’d like to add about these books is folks listening in and you guys, I’m just a government major; I’ve never taken a course in electronics. I was doing these books as a hobby.  I was having as much fun as you can imagine.  Coming up with all these circuits and playing with them and then say I’m going to put these into a book and to be able to earn a living from that I was stunned by that.  In recent years not a week goes by that I don’t get an email, sometimes several, from folks who were teenagers back in those days, maybe in their 20s who made there career electronics because of reading those books.  So that has been a very fulfilling aspect of the whole project.
Dave: My hand is up; yes I was at the ripe age.  I was 8 years old when I first got your books and yeah that definitely helped start me off that’s for sure so thank you very much Forrest.  0:30:14.8
Forrest: Glad to hear it.
Chris: I’m sure we will hear from many more, everybody when they heard that you were coming on the show too.  I’m a bit younger so I didn’t start that way but I read them later. That must be insane.  Me and Dave were talking before the who just trying to figure out even just percentage of our audience is probably a large percentage who started because of you or had read a book at some point.  That’s very impressive.
Forrest: I must add that some point writing these books became rather tedious, I would sit there and hand letter these many notebooks at the bar in our kitchen because it has this nice bright fluorescent light.  The books are written with a 7mm mechanical pencil and I have same pencil, eraser and straight edge.  After a while though it’s pretty tedious.  The Engineer’s Notebook that you have that was with Indian ink on Mylar.
Dave: I was going to say yeah the contrast is phenomenal.  The black text really stands out.
Forrest:  Well it made my middle finger bleed, I decided never again, never again.  Not only that if you made a mistake with India ink on Mylar you had redo the whole page.
Dave: Yeah that’s what I was just going to ask about that’s crazy!
Forrest: At some point, the date was 1988 I was walking back from the creek and I touched the fence and I just had this extreme development occurred – stop writing your electronics books and start using your electronics to do science. So I prepared a big proposal for Scientific American magazine and that’s how the science got started.
Dave:  They would accept proposals from anyone? Or did you have a name that you know that lent some credence tot hat.
Forrest: Scientific Magazine, the oldest magazine continually published in the US, had a column called the ‘Amateur Scientist’.  That was a very famous column it began back in the late 1920s with astronomy columns and all through my youth that was the science column to read, all sorts of fascinating experiments I dreamed of one day contributing one project to that. I ended up doing that, somebody plagiarized one of my laser circuits and put it in there but they didn’t put my name on it.
Dave: oh no!
Forrest: The editor didn’t know that so he apologized, so anyway I knew one of the editors in 1988, he’d interviewed me for a story he wrote and so he told me I should submit this proposal when I called him up.  I prepared a detailed proposal with 36 column ideas – that would be 3 year’s worth of columns and sent that off to the magazine.  They studied that for a year and a half, invited me to go to New York to meet with the staff.  I went with a suitcase full of all kinds of electronic gadgets. My radio controlled camera that you can fly from a kite, my sunlight measuring instruments and so forth and they were all excited and I got the job. So I’d thought, ended up that the editor wasn’t too happy when he asked me some personal questions during the interview process so I only ended up being able to write 3 columns for the magazine before I got dumped.  He asked me if I believed in Darwinian evolution, after asking what magazines I wrote for, I said, ‘I write for Bicycling Magazine, Popular Photography, I’ve written for a couple of Christian magazines and that really got him up.  ‘What have you written for Christian magazines?’  I said a couple of articles on long distance bicycle trips and then he said’ Do you believe in the Darwinian theory of evolution?’.  I knew my jobs was gone, I said ‘well no I don’t but neither does Stephen J Gould’, a famous evolutionist who had problems with Darwin’s theory.  At any rate a big adventure happened thereafter, I only got to write the 3 columns.  When I got dumped it became a worldwide publicity thing I was on over 100 radio stations a bunch of TV stations, the New York times came to my front door, Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal interviewed me. It became a big PR nightmare for Scientific American.
Dave: But you got published in other places and you continued all your amateur science stuff? Are you more known for that now than the electronics stuff?
Forrest: It’s beginning to be that way.  Larry Steckler who was the editor of Radio Electronics, he’d been discriminated against, he’s Jewish, when he was a young guy, a young reporter.  He was discriminated against by a major magazine; he took pity on me and started a magazine after I got bumped from Scientific American.  Magazine was called Science Probe and I was the founding editor and Larry was the publisher and we did that for about 3 years and published a first class science magazine for amateur scientists.  We had 40 authors, some of them quite famous, including an astronaut.  After that everything started happening, I started writing scientific papers for journals and let me assure your listeners – if you have a really really good idea, don’t worry if you don’t have a really really good education.  It’s the idea that counts and if you can implement it.  So I was implementing all kinds of things without a science background but you know what? My entire career not a single consulting client I’ve worked for, including NASA, NOA and EPA and so on.  Not a single one has asked me what my degree is, all they care about it what have you published in the scholarly literature.  They already know the answers to that so… 0:36:17.8
Dave: That is exactly the same in the electronics engineering industry; most companies don’t care about your educational background.  Can you do the job? Yes No? That’s it end of story.
Forrest: Exactly and not to discourage people from following that route but unfortunately a lot of folks are getting out of college these days and cant find a job.   Bill Gates doesn’t have a degree, Paul Allen doesn’t have a degree.  Many other folks very famous in the computer field never got their degree and yet look – what they’ve done.
Dave: Yep it’s all about execution.
Forrest: Exactly
Chris: What is your take on the … obviously the publishing industry has hit some rough times lately what about your thoughts on the job market in general these days.  You see this as a consultant, what do you see personally?
Forrest: I have a few friends who are out of work but I don’t really see that much of the industry.  What I see is in the filed of science government money is drying up. It’s very very difficult for people to get grants these days, that’s affected some of my research.  Hey you can do it on your own and so if I can live with what I’m making from my book loyalties I can still do my science.  I will have 25 years of atmospheric data a year from February
Dave: That’s fantastic.
Forrest: I measure the ozone layer every day the sun shines, you need sunlight to point the instrument at the sun.  I measure the aerosol optical depth of the atmosphere that’s the haze, I measure the photosynthetic radiation, I measure the total column water vapor – that’s the blanket of water over your head not the relative humidity of the ground, that’s the total amount of water vapor.  That’s the leading greenhouse gas and very few people measure that.  The weather balloons measure it but because the temperature sensors on weather balloons don’t always work properly or the relative humidity sensors don’t always work properly that record is controversial.  SO anyway I can do all my science for free!  I’ve built all the instruments, right before we went on the air with your program here I went outside, retrieved my – I’m holding it my hand right here – it’s a twilight photometer, it’s an ultra sensitive op amp with a 40Gb and 20Gb feedback resistor you can choose one or the other.
Chris: Nice
Forrest: Huge amplification, I can measure the twilight glow of the sky when the sun has set 45-50 minutes ago and I record that every second so I am looking right now at my data for this evening and I can see a big dip at 20-30km caused my this permanent layer of dust in the stratosphere and I can also see some junk down below caused by sulfate smog from power plants in the Ohio valley that drifted over Texas.  0:39:02.8
Chris: Sorry our bad
Dave: 25 years you’ve been doing that
Forrest: 24 but I’ll have 25 in another year from now.
Dave: Fantastic, obviously you haven’t been using the same sensor and logger for that entire period right?  How do you handle the switchover of instruments in terms of ensuring that your data is … there’s no bias caused by switching test gear.
Forrest: Super question, that’s the ultimate question.  Two of my instruments, one of them goes back to February 4th of 1990 when I began and the other goes back to 1991 so ..
Dave: Ah so they do?
Forrest: The reason they do that is I measure sunlight using light emitting diodes instead of filters and phonophoto diodes.  Filters degrade over time, light emitting diodes tend not to degrade over time.  So the two LEDs in my very first sun photometer are still there today.  Those two LEDs I measure the optical depth of the atmosphere at those two wavelengths 880 and 940 nanometers.  I also measure the total column water vapor.  So that is extremely important data to have with one instrument for 24 straight years.
Chris: I thought that LEDS do degrade over time though.  What I’m thinking of is.. the emitter is – are you using that as a detector?
Forrest: As an emitter under forward bias, yes they do degrade but as a passive sensor, there’s a very slow degradation in some LEDs just the atomic migration within the crystal.
Chris: Right the implantation stuff right
Forrest: Exactly, but I calibrate these at Hawaii’s Mauna Loa Observatory every year, well I’ve been going since 1992.
Chris: That must be a tough trip for you Forrest? (Inaudible )I have to go to Hawaii
Forrest: They all think that it’s a tourist trip.  I promise you the observatory is at 11, 200 feet.
Chris: I’ve been there actually
Dave: I have been up there too, it’s hard to breathe.
Forrest: You’re talking about Mauna Kea
Dave: Oh yes sorry
Chris: Sorry where the mountain is where everybody goes for the sunrise that’s where I’ve been …
Forrest: Right right, Mauna Loa is the other big mountain.  You wake up in the morning, I’m usually there for 12 nights.  I come down every 2-3 days to get a shower and buy groceries.  Once per trip I get to go swimming, usually not always.  It’s not an easy trip, you get up at 4.45am and you go to bed around 11pm so it’s an all day job.  It’s a lot of work calibrating instruments so I can see the palms trees with my binoculars and when I go down to get my shower I can see them.
Chris: So can I ask you a bigger broader question here?
Forrest: Sure sure.
Chris: Why do you do this stuff?
Dave: It’s fun dude! It’s fun!
Chris: Hear me out here Dave.  This is a basic question, this is a life long pursuit for you so what is driving you here?
Forrest: Life is a science fair project.
Chris: Oh I like that.
Dave: There’s a t-shirt quote!
Chris: Yes it is.
Forrest: When I was a senior in high school I was fascinated by analog computers so I built simple multipliers and dividers using potentiometers, batteries and a meter.  Anybody can do that.  I wanted something more sophisticated, I designed a machine – I call it a machine on purpose that would translate 20 words of -one language into 20 words of another language.  It used an analog input panel of six dials, potentiometers with all the letters of the alphabet and that went to a box and inside of that box was a memory board consisting of 20 small little trim pots and you could adjust each one of those for unique resistance.  So each one of those was the memory and each one became a word that I wanted to translate.  Then there was a Wheatstone bridge circuit, just a couple of resistors and a potentiometer and then there was a meter and the meter needle had a piece of aluminum foil glued to it and a black cover over the whole panel of the meter except for a slot.  There’s a light looking down from the meter and under the meter I had glued a small piece of a silicone solar cell.  So I could detect when there was a null.  When the meter nulled I would get a signal and the meter would null when the memory matched whatever I dialed into the six potentiometer panel.  Then there was an electric music box that I had modified by putting paint on the little cylinder that rotates and I had some little wires that stuck out and dragged along that cylinder and I had little openings in the paint where the wires dragging on the cylinder could contact the metal cylinder so I could sample the memory that way.
Dave: Oh brilliant.
Forrest: You dial in your word you hit a switch that says on, then everything starts cranking, the little music box is rotating then the meter needle is swinging back and forth.  When the meter needle hits a null that means the word matches, it stops, that turns off the motor and then there’s a light panel and there’s 20 lights and one red light lights up and that’s the translated word.
Chris: Wow
Forrest: So it’s an analog digital machine and the mathematics curator of the Smithsonian came to visit us around 20 years ago to collect all my Altair stuff, she saw that and they asked for that.  So that’s at the Smithsonian, I don’t know what they are doing with it but it’s considered an early hobby computer project. 0:44:34.6
Dave: Terrific
Chris: So was that a science fair project is that was the segway was there?
Forrest: Yeah that was my senior science fair.
Chris: That is a life science fair project I gotta say it, that’s really interesting.
Forrest: Built at 246 (inaudible) street Pratnel Alabama where my dad was assigned to the Maxwell Air force base in Montgomery Alabama.
Dave: I’ve got a question on the sensor data for long term scientific experiment, I just love this sort of stuff.  So it’s more important to have a sensor that is absolutely the same sensor stable over time or the same test instrument stable over time than it is to have a calibrated sensor that is always changing for example.
Forrest: The answer is yes if the sensor doesn’t drift.  So even with
Dave: Of course I’m assuming it’s got zero drift
Forrest: Right some of these LEDS do have zero drift, I’m operating a, I’ve got the only light emitting diode, shadow band solar radiometer it’s up on the roof on the University in my town here.  I manage these instruments for the department of agriculture through Colorado state university and one of those instruments has got 7 LEDS in it.  A couple of them have drifted but two or three of them are just as stable as a rock after 10 years.

Dave: Ahh so you take seven individual readings and then monitor them over time and throw out the ones that are drifting I guess.
Forrest: More or less, If you go onto my website you can see some of this data on my main website, www.forestmims.org and if you click on science data you can see some of the plots of the data.
Dave: Fantastic, because that’s very difficult to do is to devote 25 years to continuously actually collecting and monitoring them and throwing out bad data as it drifts and all that sort of stuff to be left with a good set of data.
Forrest:  I like the way you think, we’re kindred spirits.
Dave: Excellent
Forrest: You’re thinking exactly what I was thinking at the time and after 5 years of doing this and that was 20 years ago I was about ready to quit ‘why am I doing this every day?’  I could be writing, why am I fooling around doing this?  And then what happened was all of a sudden I start making discoveries you know.
Dave: Ahhhh yep yep.
Chris: Yep the feedback loop.
Forrest: Mount Pinatubo erupted in the Philippine islands and the volcanic ash cloud came over Texas and I measured that, I measured smoke coming from Yellowstone fires over Texas and finding strange things happening in the ozone layer.  At one point NASA’s ozone satellite went bad and I was finding an error in their satellite.  I knew all those guys so I contacted them and said you guys there’s a problem here, you aren’t showing enough ozone.  They said look Forrest our satellite there $100 million tied up in that and you’ve just got this little …
Dave: You’ve just got a couple of LEDS down there!
Forrest: Well actually those instruments did use filters, they are ultra violet detectors but that’s another story, but anyway I said yeah I’ve only got this instrument but I’ve got two and they are both showing the same error and then they still didn’t take me seriously.  So then I got to go to Hawaii for the first time in 1992 to give a talk about being dumped at Scientific American, this scientific group wanted me to give that talk.  So I got to go to the observatory and the woman operating the world standard ozone instrument told me she was also seeing a difference between her data and the satellite.
Chris: Yes vindication.
Forrest: It was of the same order of magnitude as I was seeing so I notified them and that became my first paper in the journal Nature.
Chris: Which if people don’t know it’s a big big …
Dave: It’s the preeminent, some scientists spend their entire career wanting to get one article, one paper in Nature.
Forrest: Well that built my career.  NASA who did not want me to find an error in their satellite they end up inviting me to go to Gardiner spaceflight center and give a talk about how I did that.  They entitled the talk ‘doing earth science on a shoestring budget.’  Then I got a Rolex prize for that same project.  What was really interesting about that is, some of your listeners, look if you have a really great idea, look up the Rolex prize, maybe you have something worthy of that because they will give you some good seed money.  So Rolex does all these interviews and I get a hone call one day and they are going to give me this award and there were two cool things about that number one they advertised the award in Scientific American which had dumped me and that Ozone instrument was going to be one of my next projects so I got in their magazine with the project just not the details of how to build it and the other interesting thing was when they sent their movie crew out to make a video of all their winners and they ship that all around the world for TV.  Well the video crew comes out and I was telling them the story about finding the error in NASAs satellite and I said they are gonna fax me today to let me know if they agree that I really have found an error.  So we walk into my office and there’s a fax laying on my desk so I reach over to get the fax and the producer yells at me’ Don’t touch that fax!’ I said ‘why not’ he said ‘I’ve been filming  Nobel prize winners and all sorts of famous things for years and years.  I’ve never actually seen any real science.  It’s either fake or re enacted.  I don’t want you to read that fax til we’ve got our camera ready to go.  So I was kinda nervous, I didn’t know what it was going to say.  0:50:24.2
Chris: It could say …. drink more Ovaltine.
Forrest: It took ten minutes to get those guys ready and so finally they said sit down and then he tells the camera guy start, whatever they say go, action and then he tells me ‘ you may read your fax’.  So I turn it over and started reading it and NASA was admitting that I had found an error in their satellite.  So it was really exciting, then they actually called  the scientist Richard McPeters and discussed it with him on the telephone and a little bit of that conversation was included on the video.
Dave: Is this video on YouTube somewhere or has it just been lost in the archives?
Forrest: I don’t know, I’ve got a copy of it I’d love to get that on YouTube but it’s not.
Forrest: Yeah absolutely.  You can somehow scan it .. what format.
Chris: If only we knew someone, that was on YouTube that could help them out Dave right?
Forrest: It’s a VHS.
Dave: VHS that’s not too hard to still copy
Forrest: I’ve got a bunch of .. type in F Mims on YouTube and you can see a bunch of my video clips.  This would be great to put that on I hadn’t even thought about it.  It may be on the web I don’t know.
Dave: Well maybe but I doubt it, definitely put it on your channel.  Do it your self and upload it please.
Chris: I found the page on the Rolex awards, there is a large site for Rolex awards.  That’s the rest of my evening I’m going to be looking through all this stuff.  Yeah there’s photos and everything too – that’s great.  Man that’s so cool such a great story.
Dave: It’s an awesome story.
Chris: SO you have written also about something with Brazil?  So was that the same project you went down to Brazil for?
Forrest: Actually NASA took me, they brought me out to give that talk about the satellite and then after the talk some of the individual scientists wanted to get together and one group .. Brent Holben, who is a really sharp atmospheric scientist.  He and his buddies wanted me to go to Brazil because the satellite that I had found an error in at that point had quit working.  So they needed somebody to measure the ozone layer for them through the smoke during the burning season.  They asked me if I would be willing to go and I said sure.  They gave me a $5000 purchase order and with that I hired a student, actually hiring a student consisted of me paying his airfare and buying food.  We ran out of food, I lost 7lbs on that trip.
Chris: Oh no!
Forrest: we went to Cuiaba Brazil we were there for 3 weeks that was my first really serious field science.  Then the next year they had me go to seven forest fires out west to do the same thing with their new ozone satellite then the following year they had me go back to Brazil.  NASA had been kicked out of Brazil at that point because of political reasons, I don’t want to go into that.  These countries sometimes want money in exchange for the US to do science so that was a big thing.  I’ve never told this story and I won’t go into detail but I will put it in a book.  Let’s just say that NASA wanted me to pose as a tourist.  You don’t do that , you don’t do that.  It’s their country not our country so I did get a letter of permission after being warned whatever you do don’t pose as a tourist because they will arrest you if you’re doing science.
Chris: That  sounds like a good title too … ‘Criminal Scientist ..’ or something
Dave: Yeah exactly!
Forrest: there were some days the smoke was so thick that airplanes couldn’t land in the small air field, we were in a very remote region of Brazil and my left lung hurt for 3 weeks after I got back.  The smoke was awful, it was awful.
Dave: So what’s your take on the current state of the climate?  Are we screwing this planet?
Forrest: No
Dave: We’re not?
Forrest: We’re doing this wrong for example, land use is the big problem.  Carbon dioxide is not the primary greenhouse gas water vapor it.  The reason the modelers are still wrong and the reason the temperature of the earth has not risen in the past 15-16 years and conformants will know that the models were predicting is that the models predict positive feedback caused by carbon monoxide evaporating more water than usual.  That excess water is where you get the warming – not the CO2.  The CO2 causes a mild warming and the water vapor amplifies that by several times.  Well that’s just not happening.  My 24 year water vapor record in Texas is showing a decline in total water vapor of about 1.1 or 1.2 mm per decade.  Notice I can say decade and not year.  The modelers are not using all the available data. They are not using the latest NASA NVAP results which show no significant trend in water vapor around the entire globe since 1988.  You got all these 24 global climate models that are total failures in predicting what the temperature is supposed to be.  We are nowhere near what they were predicting 12 – 15 years ago because the earth’s temperature has not risen.
Chris: Interesting
Dave: What about in terms of pollution, atmospheric pollution. 0:55:24.7
Forrest: In the United States the air has never been cleaner.  I just got back from Washington DC, I measure the optical depth on 2 different days right at the same exact location behind the Smithsonian castle that Charles Abbot and his colleagues a century ago were doing the same work.  They pioneered sun photometry for the whole world.  I’ve done this 2 times this year and last year and I did it 10 years ago.  In all cases the air is cleaner today than when it was when Charles abbot was measuring it on the best days.  Why is that?  Well …paved streets – they did not have paved streets.  Burning up coal – we don’t burn coal in cities today we burn coal in power plants.
Chris: For heating you mean?
Forrest: They heated their homes with the burning of coal when it was cool.  Back in their October November they had much more air pollution than we do today.
Chris: What is the effect of localized … so you mentioned you’re doing all this instrumentation, visualization and monitoring like that.  What’s the different because of satellite versus localized measurements like you’re taking.  How do you rectify that data against one another?
Forrest: The satellites cannot measure the temperature at the surface, they measure the temperature at various levels of the atmosphere and you can see those data have not shown a rise in temperature for the past 16 or 17 years.  There are very subtle changes but nowhere near what the models were predicting.
Chris: So you were saying that the clarity of the air though as well .. pollution levels.
Forrest: That record does not go back very far.  The best record is the modus instrument on the Terra and the Aqua satellites and that data goes back around 10 years or so.  If you use a sun photometer with a red and a green LED as the detectors.  And you compare that with the overpasses of the Terra and the Aqua as I’ve done.  If you do that within 30 seconds of the peak elevation of the satellite over your site, you will be in very very close agreement with that satellite.  They’ve got very good, NASA has very good capability for measuring optical depth with the satellite.
Chris: How do you track the satellites too?
Forrest: You can go online and type in your co-ordinates and you can find out the next overpass of the satellite and when it’s going to be.
Chris: Oh wow that’s cool.  There’s some Ham guys they point up at satellites and they can track when they are passing over with beacons and stuff too.
Forrest: Yes that’s right yeah. All these years I’ve been measuring the total optical depth of the atmosphere so I started to measure the elevation of these layers that caused there problems – that was a huge challenge but turned out people were doing that back in the 50s using the twilight glow.  That’s why I built this new instrument I’ve been using it since June.  So now I can tell you that today I had sulfate in the sky.  I knew that from the Navy research lab model and the NASA model but I can tell you that it was about 6km elevation.  I can tell you the altitude of the stratospheric aerosol layer that’s always there and it’s a little bit more today than it was 6 days ago the last time I had a clearer twilight.
Chris: How did you start learning about the basic measurements and stuff like that?  Were you just going through other publications?  So say I wanted to start atmospheric conditions today. I’d be like well I guess I could measure temperature and if there’s clouds .. I think about these other things that you are measuring I wouldn’t know where to start.
Forrest: well I started in libraries and I actually would contact some of the scientist who wrote the papers and they were very friendly, very helpful and co-operative.  As long as approach them politely and don’t bug them when they are busy they will help you.
Chris: That’s a great tip.
Forrest: My first ozone instruments, a couple of NASA guys were very helpful in getting me started.  A manufacturer gave me some free filters at the Smithsonian and those filters were worth $300-400 each and they gave me ten of them.  That got me started.
Chris: Wow.  Did you go back to those guys who helped you with the ozone spec like’ Hey sorry I told you your satellite was broken ..’
Laughter
Forrest: Well yeah …. they knew that before it was published in Nature.  I had another paper in nature on ultra violet and people criticize the peer review process and sometimes it is totally goofy but generally the peer reviewers really help show you how you can strengthen your paper by fixing this or fixing that.
Dave: Oh right so there’s a feedback mechanism there they don’t just go we accept or we reject.
Forrest: Definitely, that doesn’t happen with like .. when I would send a book to RadioShack there was no feedback.  At popular electronics would,  you had to submit an instrument and they would check it that way to make sure it worked. Anyway I made some measurements in Hawaii of ultra violet, I had 16 ultra violet data loggers using little onset hobo 8 bit data loggers and I built UV sensors for those with cosine-corrected Teflon diffusers.  Planted those in 16 places across the island and collected them after 4 days.  They all had interesting data, but the one at the Mauna Loa observatory itself showed these big spikes in ultra violet and I thought where did this come from?  It was obviously caused my clouds I checked and yes – on a clear day you get a bell shaped curve a Gaussian distribution.  When clouds were nearer the sun you get these big spikes caused by scattering of sunlight from the side of the cloud.  I contacted John Frederick, University of Chicago.  He is a world famous ultra violet guy.  I wrote a small paper for Nature, he added a paragraph about a technical thing I asked him to do.  We submitted it to nature and it was reviewed by 2 reviewers, they conduct their own in-house review then they send it out to peer review.  The first reviewer said, we’ve known about this for years but nobody has ever published it that clouds can cause UV to increase by this much and it was like 15-20%.
Chris: Wow so definitely significant data.  1:01:44.5
Forrest: The second reviewer wrote exactly the same thing.  That he was aware of it but nobody had published it they both recommended publishing no sweat.  But the paper I wrote on the satellite error that was rejected and so Nature’s response was NASA should correct it’s own errors in our Journal.  I wrote back and said with all due respect, NASA is not going to correct their error on this satellite.  Then the overall editor John Maddox, he’s a Physicist who had great respect for amateur scientists, he’s also an atheist.  He also knew about my adventures with Scientific American, I’d never met the man.  He overruled the staff and they published my paper about that satellite error.
Dave: Nice
Chris: So what would be your estimation about amateur scientists being published.  Not just in Nature, I mean Nature that’s mind blowing but what about in general publications.  I think of academic publications like that and I don’t know anyone else who does amateur type science like that.  In general you may be the first amateur scientist I know is this in depth and so passionate about it it’s crazy.
Forrest: There are some others also, there are some great amateur astronomers who have made major discoveries.  The gentleman who found out that the comet was going to strike Jupiter.
Dave: Shoemaker! He was an
Forrest: No he was not the amateur that was deeply involved in that that LED Shoemaker to make that discovery.
Dave: I thought Shoemaker was an amateur though.
Forrest: Well he may have been an amateur but I thought he was a professor but the bottom line was that was very much coordinated by an amateur scientist I’m trying to remember his name, he’s a great astronomy photographer and another gentleman I believe is an Ophthalmologist.  He discovered a large storm on Jupiter well before NASA did.  Then there’s some amateur paleontologists, the paleontologist who lived in New Mexico he discovered Jurassic era dinosaur tracks in sandstone near Las Cruces New Mexico.  He tried to convince the various New Mexico museums that these were authentic and he was rejected.  He then drove all the way to Pittsburgh and then to Washington, they accepted his work and made him a curator of the place where he was finding all these fossils.  He was studying Sociology, looking for PhD in Sociology.  So there are a handful of guys doing this but I wish there were more.  I am involved with the Citizen Scientist League and CSL we have some guys I think we are going to be publishing – George Hrabovsky for example he’s an amateur physicist, who has co-authored a book with a very famous physicist, that’s doing quite well.  he’s also a first class mathematician so there’s some guys out there who do really good amateur science.  There just aren’t enough of them. 1:04:42.0
Chris: Yeah wow that’s really cool.
Dave: So do you do more – do you do any hobby electronics anymore or is it just as a spin off to your science projects?
Forrest: Well of course, all the sunlight work I do is all based on my electronics.  If I didn’t know how to design an ultra high gain op amp .. by the way this photometer I’m holding in my hand is closed in an aluminum box because the gain is so high you cannot have any electro-magnetic interference.
Chris: 40gig-ohms is pretty high.
Forrest: Some of you listeners may have interests in other areas for example music and I’ve built a circuit many years ago that I call a stepped tone generator published that in popular electronics and a couple of RadioShack books.  if you go online and type in Atari Punk Console, you’ll be be amazed
Chris: Lot of people know that one.
Dave: Somebody mentioned that in the comments I think.
Forrest: I’ve been invited to give a talk about that at a conference coming up and then another thing is I have a column in Make magazine and I’ve described how to take tree rings and convert that into music by moving a fiber optic probe across the rings.  A really cool college professor has come up with a program for converting data into music I don’t recall his name, he’s in my article in Make magazine and I wrote about him elsewhere.  You can convert any string of numbers like cosmic rays, the ultraviolet for a year, to musical tones and it’s just fascinating.  It’s created a whole new outlet for creativity.  Anyone can do this.
Chris: That’s a great example too taking quasi-random datasets producing energy in different areas right.
Forrest: The ultra violet cycle is seasonal so it’s not random but it’s got spikes caused my cloud dust or cloudy days where you couldn’t get a good measurement but it will start with a really low frequency dzzzz and then just build up and get higher and higher frequency and then come back down again.  So you can actually hear and visualize a seasonal cycle.  I think it would be fun for blind folks to try some of this and help them better visualize what a graph would be showing.
Chris: There was a great video on YouTube I saw the other day where people were auditorially playing sorting algorithms, how computers sort datasets and they were playing that into audi tones and you got to watch it and hear it  There was such a visceral difference.  If I was looking at it, it would be boring but hearing how the computer shuffle these things around was really interesting.
Forrest: Fascinating
Chris: Same with Baba O’reilly the Who song that was based on biometric data that they put into their computer and the song teenage wasteland a lot of people know but ..
Dave: Nope sorry
Chris: Anyways that’s really neat.
Dave: So are you working on any books?
Forrest: Yeah several, I’m starting a memoir.  I wrote Solar Connections in the 80s and that book badly needs updating so it will be a memoir about all of these adventures and probably going to be called the ways of science.  It’s an outsider entering the world of science by  simply having some electronics knowledge.  That’s one book, then I’m working on a novel, then I’m working on another project book and then I want to do a book about all these measurements that I do.
Dave: Are you self-publishing these or are you going through a main publisher what’s the deal?
Forrest: I told my wife last night, you know I’m a little concerned about the future of some of these books with the publishing industry in such turmoil right now.  But you know what it doesn’t matter today does it.  You can put a book on amazon or in Kindle form or elsewhere for free.  Who knows by the time you make your royalty from them who knows you might be making as much or more than through a conventional publisher.  I would rather use a conventional publisher, but if that doesn’t happen I will publish them anyway.
Chris: Because you don’t give your rights away up front, that’s all that really matters.
Forrest: Absolutely.
Chris: Then you can self publish and I think the trend these days to is to give some of that stuff away and then you make it up in speakers fees and that kind of thing.  That’s what Chris Anderson always talks about, the freemium type models there.
Forrest: Yeah, yeah.
Chris: They sound like great books, I’m excited for those to come out.  The Solar connections book can you tell us about that book a little more?
Forrest: That was a memoir I wrote in 1986 this is by McGraw Hill.  It’s just the story about .. it has a whole section about the PC Altair, it has a story about I got involved in a lawsuit with Bells Labs when they used an invention that I sent them without permission.  That’s the only time I’ve been involved in a lawsuit but that was an adventure in itself, learning how lawyers act it was amazing.  I’ll just tell you one story I was having a deposition in that lawsuit, I had invented a way of communicating with LEDS 2 ways where an LED that emits light with a modulated voice or signal is the same LED that detects the light so you can have a fiber optic link with one fiber and one device at each end .  So I submitted that to Bell labs and they said they didn’t want it but they would keep it in mind and if they ever used it they would get back in touch with me.  They never got back to me but Dave Gunzel my RadioShack editor was reading business week magazine one day and saw an announcement that described exactly what I had sent Bell Labs.  1:10:30.6
Dave: Oh No
Forrest: So there began a lawsuit that was quite complex, very interesting the way that it worked out.  I had to do a lot of depositions and one was at the offices of a Texas criminal attorney that Bell Labs had hired to represent them.  I’d read a book on negotiation that says always take the best seat in the house.  So I went into this room and the best seat in the house was looking at the Texas state capitol, so I sat in that chair.  Then the lawyer came in and introduces himself and says now you’re actually seated where I sit – that’s my chair.  Wouldn’t you rather sit here and I said no Sir this will do just fine.  So I sat for whole deposition in his chair not realizing, that’s just what I did and there were a lot of things that happened .  One day I had to bring boxes of material to for them to look at and so I put them on a cart pushed it in and there was 4 boxes.  So they looked through all these boxes and the last box held my son who was in Six grade, held his science fair project  because they wanted everything I’d done that was relating to light emitting diodes and this project involved light emitting diodes and they were looking at that and underneath that I had put my camera and so I reached in a got my camera and took a picture of them looking at my sons science fair project.  Well they just.. there were 3 attorneys and the Texas trial attorney who just stood there didn’t do anything.  The 2 bell Labs attorneys one went out the room and hid behind the door and the other went under the table and the third went somewhere else and then they started shouting at me to put my camera away.
Chris: Man people think they have privacy issues these days right?
Forrest: Well what had happened was when they searched my house I took pictures of them and they didn’t take me seriously and I published those in my column in popular electronics and they decided they didn’t want to get published again so the Texas trial lawyer said look guys why don’t you just put the camera away.  That was we could proceed because otherwise these guys aren’t going to co-operate, so I agreed to do that.
Dave: That’s hilarious
Chris: They were like cockroaches running away from the light you know.
Forrest: Hey that’s a good description.  That’s exactly what it was like.
Forrest: They are searching my house, I gave permission to search my house, I wasn’t going to produce any documents you can go anywhere you want also I had my lawyer there.  Anyway at the end of the day they had taken 2 boxes out of our attic of book manuscripts which were quite heavy and they were wearing suits and ties and I said you can only take those out of there if you put them back and they said we’ll put the back.  At the end of the day they had not put those back and so I took them out there and said you guys you need to put those back in the attic and the Western Electric lawyer, he was not very friendly, the boxes will not be put back.  I looked at my lawyer and said then I’m not going to produce any of the documents, the documents that they have set aside to copy they are not going to get to see them unless they put those back in my attic.  That went back and forth and finally the western Electric attorney ordered his two assistants to wear their suits and ties climb up into my attic and put them back again.
Laughter
Chris: Were you outside sipping a glass of ice lemonade  .. ahhh this is so refreshing.
Forrest: Actually I thought I took a few pictures of them doing that, I did I took pictures of them doing that.
Chris: That should definitely go in the next memoir I think.
Forrest: It’s in Solar Connections.
Chris: Oh it is in that one good.
Dave: Oh you have to leave that one in.
Chris: I haven’t read that one, I think that’s going to be next on my list.
Forrest: I’m looking at it right here there’s a picture of the Western Electric attorney himself.  Western Electric attorney moving box of documents from Mims’s attic.
Laughter.
Chris: That’s just great
Dave: That’s just gold.  Do we have Reddit questions? Chris?
Chris: Yes, we do have some Reddit questions.  So we can ask these and then …
Dave: Sir Why has a question – what do you think of the Altair clones and the other things all those retro clones sort of making a mini comeback I guess?
Forrest: There are some very serious hobbyists who are building replicas of the Altair.  Several have contacted me.  original Altairs, some of them are worth money.
Dave: Oh yeah big money.
Forrest: I wrote the original manual like I mentioned a while ago and Ed would give me equipment in return and he gave me number 5.  Well it was one of the first 5 prototypes that they built after they built the one for Popular Electronics.  I gave that one to the Smithsonian Institution, which was a big mistake, I should have kept it.  They displayed it for 18 years but sometimes they would have it on the floor next to the Apple.  It preceded the Apple by a year!  Not to take away from Steve Wozniak – Wozniak is a genius ok – but he was inspired by that computer so it seemed to me that that computer the Altair should sit next to the Apple, not be underneath it on the floor.  Whatever.  These hobby guys I think it’s fascinating what they are doing some of them have build working duplicates of the Altair.
Dave: Was the Altair as horribly unreliable as people claim.
Forrest: The big problem with the Altair was the memory.  That wasn’t so much Ed’s fault as it was the memory chips fault.  The memory was a big problem. 1:15:42.8
Dave: Do tell.
Forrest: The actual motherboard of the computer, some people who may be listening had a problem with the motherboard but it was the memory board.  The spin off of that was competing companies began making better quality memory boards so at the World Altair Computer Convention WACC held at the airport Marina Hotel in Albuquerque.  I went their with Les Solomon for Popular Electronics and Larry Steckler from Radio Electronics.  I had both those guys in the car at the same time big competitors, we went to that conventions.  I remember going up the elevator to seventh or eight floor and there was a huge mob of people trying to get into the room of one of these manufacturers of these boards that would work in the Altair and work better in the Altair and that’s when Ed finally realized we’ve got big competition.  everybody realized that at that time.
Dave: After that they did last that long did they because then the S100 which is the Altair bus, it became the S100 standard and then everyone made effectively made clones or S100 compatible computers and that was all she wrote.
Forrest: Ed’s big claim to fame in one way would be the S100 bus, which became the IEEE standard.  So yeah IMSAI was the really big competitor, they built a really first class machine but they were learning from What Ed did with the Altair.  Ed was way ahead of everybody.  Ed for example, when he sold his company to Pertec, he developed a laptop computer that Pertec didn’t want to proceed with.  everything that ever happened in the PC industry happened with the Altair first, magazine, newsletter, first computer stores, everything…
Dave: First computer book which you wrote, technically.
Forrest: Book yeah he really pioneered it but he left it, he sold out to Pertec for I don’t remember exactly how much it was …
Dave: Yeah it wasn’t much..
Forrest: The low millions and then of course Paul Allen, Bill Gates stayed at Microsoft and you know what happened then.
Dave: Are there any of those old companies left?  The only one I can think of is technically Apple. Apple is still around.
Chris: Microsoft’s a hardware company again …
Dave: Lets not include Microsoft.. we’re talking hardware computer companies.
Forrest: I really don’t know if any of these other folks are still around but you’re right it’s interesting that Apple is still around I think that’s fascinating.  By the way, the Altair did not have a video monitor and did not have keyboard input, it did eventually.  People had to use teletypes to communicate with it in fact Ed did.  Les Solomon did in NYC and made the Ziff Davis bosses angry because the teletype made a lot of racket, they wanted him to get rid of it.  That became the founding for their company ZDNet as a result of that.  Steve Wozniak, the guy could design a keyboard interface, the guy could design the actual hardware, he wrote the code, he wrote the assembler, he did everything.  Wozniak is a true genius.  I used to think he was a genius because he could design an analog power supply and a digital computer.  He did a lot more than that.
Dave: We are going to have to get him on the show.  How can we get him on the show?
Forrest: You’ve got to get him.  He’s on Facebook I corresponded with him a few times, he really should be on your program.
Dave: OK you’ve twisted our arm.
Chris: Now that we’ve had Forrest Mims on, that’s the important one so …So you’re talking about the legacy of these companies.  What about the legacy of the hobbyist market and seeing that kind of cycle back around  I think it was 2003 RadioShack stopped publishing a bunch of books and RadioShack  took a nosedive for a while but even they are coming back and the maker movement and all that.  What’s your general feeling about that stuff.
Forrest: Well that’s fascinating, if my books sold less than 20,000 a year they were dropped from the stores.  Imagine that 20,000.  20,000 is almost a best seller anywhere else.
Dave: I know
Chris: Absolutely
Forrest: RadioShack had 8,00 stores and then they dropped all these books, well the books supported the electronics and so that cut a big hole in their electronics business.  They are now selling my books again.  I was selling directly to RadioShack and my books are being sold for very low prices.  Now they are having to buy them at the same price that I sell them to my publisher and to Amazon and so on and it’s a lot more money.
Dave: My ones got $1.99 on it 1979. 1:20:19.1
Forrest: That’s right and that books started at that. Getting started in electronics was when they dropped it I think $3.95 and now it’s like $19.95 and it would probably be $5 if I was selling it directly but they got out of that and I’m trapped into another situation.  There’s another angle, they also dropped my lab kits, including my best selling lab kit – Electronics Learning Lab which is used by a lot of schools.  That really hurt because school kids needed those, well they have brought that back.  It will be in stores this Christmas if all goes well.
Dave: Fantastic.
Forrest: So hopefully they will survive but RadioShack is in trouble.  Hobby electronics is not what it once was.  I don’t build data loggers, I buy them it’s a lot cheaper to buy one than it is to go build one.
Dave: Were you thinking the same as me, before all this maker movement came along probably the late 90s early 2000s did you think the electronics hobbyist movement was dead or dying.
Forrest: I thought it was dying it will never be dead.
Dave: No it will never be dead but it was dying.
Forrest: when you go to a hardware store today you buy the same screws and nails they were selling 100 years ago along with all the modern counterparts and so forth.  You’ll always have that audience, it’s just going to be harder and harder to find certain parts like TTL logic for example is much harder to find.  It’s always going to be there, it’s just I don’t think it will ever be at the level it once was because things are so cheaply manufactured now.  I’ve got a hone next to me that’s my pocket radar and satellite, it’s my world library.  We hobbyists can’t build that but we can take what’s in that phone – it’s not a phone really it’s a computer with a phone app.  We can take that technology and do incredible things with it.  I do science.  The maker movement is phenomenal.  I have a column in make magazine and I love writing that column because I want to challenge these makers who do fantastic mechanical things to do science with their mechanical talents.  In other words instead of building bicycles that ride upside down in a tank of water, why not build something that can collect data from a sounding rocket?  I’m kind of hoping to build that kind of audience at some point.
Dave: Awesome.  What’s the circulation of Make magazine? I read somewhere that Popular Electronics was 450,000 subscribers.
Forrest:  I thought it was 600,000 it was a huge circulation.  Make is nowhere near that but I don’t know what it is.  Make magazine is, there are two magazines that are must reading.  make and nuts and bolts.  Nuts and Bolts is popular electronics today with first class state of the art up to date articles.  They have a little bit of fluff but some of that stuff is really really good.  Some really creative writers.  So I urge everybody to checkout Nuts and Bolts magazine, the editor is a fabulous guy.  He’s got a PhD, he just write a book.  In fact I wrote the foreword to this book.  It’s a book on taking stuff apart, dismantling stuff to se how it works.  Make magazine is like a book in itself, it’s not really a magazine it’s like a little book.  It’s a quarterly but I think they are going to bring it out more often.  I don’t know if I am supposed to say that but I think that is in the he works.
Dave: what do you think is the reason for this maker revolution? People are getting back into taking stuff apart.
Forrest: OK have you ever been to a robotics show of any kind competition.
Dave: I have been to a robot wars competition yeah.
Forrest: My daughter is very famous for discoveries she made in high school, all three – if you want to be in my family you have to do a science fair project.
Laughter
Forrest: Church on Sunday and a science fair project in March and so my kids are famous they are all over the world.  My son’s project won most number of awards out of a regional science fair, my oldest daughter her science fair projects about sun spots are detecting solar x-ray flares with a Geiger counter that’s a chapter in a book and our youngest daughter Sarah, she detected living spores and bacteria, living microbes in smoke arriving in Texas from Yucatan.
Dave: Wow
Forrest: That’s fascinating. Unknown to me she was also the president of her high school robotics club.
Chris: Was this first or was it a different type of ….
Forrest: No it was not first it was a different one.  They had a package of materials I don’t know who provided that I don’t remember but when I found out about it I was intrigued.  I never went to any of her meetings or anything but I did go to the competition and they had this really clunky robot but it worked.  It really really worked.  I think the robotics movement is really where it’s at.  I’m working on a column about a special kind of robotics competition right now in Make magazine, proposing a new style of competition.  instead of throwing balls and catching hoops I’ve got an idea that would teach people science through robotics.  The kids operating the robots will not know what is happening.  They are going to be behind a curtain and their robot is going to go through this curtain and it’s going to do all the things that I have planned for it, all the sensing it has to do.  It’s going to be a MARS lander type deal.  The robot operators, the kids will be able to see what the robot is looking at and they steer it be following a particular protocol that they have to follow, they’ll go a smooth surface, a rocky surface.  Then they are going to be measuring sunlight it will be a simulated sun in the form of a big light they are going underneath a smoke screen which will simulate a Martian dust storm.  They will have to measure the change in sunlight and from that calculate the optical depth.   Then they are going to have to sample some soil and sample some gravel.  They bring all that stuff back through the curtain and they are scored on how well they do on all those tasks and on the reduction of the scientific data. 1:26:35.3
Chris: Wow and then they go outside and launches a huge rocket.
Forrest: There you go!
Chris: Great.  And you know there’s a very real possibility that those kids just could be the next ones that are at JPL and celebrating when the rover touches down, that’s great.
Forrest: Absolutely.
Dave: well you see a lead flasher, like a triple 5 lead flasher just doesn’t cut it anymore as excitement for the kids does it?
Overspeaking
Forrest: I’d have to say one thing about that it is a little odd that people would use a micro or Arduino for example to build a little flasher when they could just use the 555 to do the same thing.  And another thing when you take for example, I give a lot of talks to schools and adult groups, service clubs and you take a silver coin and you pull that out of your pocket , a silver dime and you put that next to a piece of magnesium and you out a piece of moist paper in between with a little lemon juice on it and you light up a little LED with that homemade battery.  I don’t care who they are they are just amazed.  Absolutely amazed they see something like that and they never occurred to them that you could make electricity with a silver dime.  So there are things that people can be impressed by that are ultra simple.  For example the concept of using an LED to detect light still fascinates people.
Chris &Dave: Yeah
Chris: And it doesn’t have to cost $365 in order to make people really excited about it either.
Forrest: My desk here is covered with LEDS I’m testing for another instrument I’m going to be making that will use a specific kind of LED that will measure these twilight glows.  I’m also using this to measure sky light pollution, pollution caused by city lights that bothers telescope users.  The same photometer will measure that.
Chris: Like light pollution you said.
Forrest: Light pollution, exactly.
Dave: You’ll notice he called it 555 there Chris.
Chris: what did I say 5 5 5?
Dave: Well I say triple 5
Chris:  I think we will have to defer to Forrest, we did a survey on the show a hundred episodes ago about how people say it and how it’s different around the country – we can link it in too.  The least often used was triple nickel but uh …
Dave: That’s ridiculous, triple nickel.
Chris: But yes there was a wide range of how people say it and everything as well.
Dave: Forrest is in the 555 camp.
Forrest: This has never occurred to me in all these years.  Every time I talk to people about the 555 I guess they assume that’s the way it is supposed to be said.  The inventor is he not still around? Hanz..
Dave: Unfortunately he is not no. Hanz Camenzind
Forrest: That’s too bad.
Chris: There is an audio interview with him that’s pretty good.  I’m not sure if he mentions it anywhere in there but there is a 1 or 2 part interview with him that’s worth a listen to.  It was sad to hear he had passed.  He passed this past year I think.
Forrest: He is really .. we owe him a lot.  The guy was a genius.  He and Wozniak are in a class of their own.
Chris: Yeah right, and he has a couple of books I think online.
Forrest: Yes excellent material.
Chris: His and yours as well all the people you brought into the hobby and kept them around.  We wouldn’t have an audience without you I don’t think so …we do appreciate it.
Forrest: Well I’ve enjoyed visiting with you guys thank you very much.
Dave: Thank you very much for .. it’s been fantastic an hour and half worth of awesomeness.  There we go.
Forrest: Well it’s been fun.
Chris: Right Forrest well thanks again and please do let us know when the next round of books I can only assume, the slew of books that hit the shelves, please do let us know and we’ll let everyone know here and hopefully have you back on at some point.
Forrest: I’ll do that Chris I’ll do that.
Dave: And where can people follow you on Twitter?  Are you a tweeting man.
Forrest: @fmims on Twitter and I’m on Facebook and I’m on my website.  On Facebook and same with Twitter
Dave: Facebook sucks right.
Forrest: Well I put a note that some of the science I’m doing and a whole bunch of people responded and I thought that was kind of cool so I occasionally put a note on about the science I’m doing or I have a weekly science column in the newspapers and I’ll sometime post that so I do use Facebook for that and a few family things but I don’t get overly wrapped up in it.  My website has got a lot of information about what we have been talking about.  Forrestmims.org you know …
Chris: We’ll link everything into the show notes
Forrest: Oh super.
Chris: Lot of good stuff here so lot of links for people to click.
Forrest: Well you guys are doing a great service and what I’m going to do is … I didn’t even know about the Amp Hour until you contacted me so I’m going to start listening to your stuff when I’m driving down the highway. 1:31:37.6
Chris: Alright
Dave: Fantastic, you’ve only got 150 episodes to catch up on.
Chris: 171 actually this is 171.
Dave: Although it’s hardly 25 years worth of atmospheric research Chris.
Chris: When we get 25 we will let you know.
Dave:  We’ll be rocking on our porch going “Welcome to the Amp Hour!”
Dave: Oh goodness anyway it’s been awesome, thank you very much Forrest!
Forrest: Thank you Dave thanks Chris.
Chris: Thank you Forrest.  Alright we’ll talk to you soon.
Forrest: Take care, bye.
Dave: See you mate bye.

The post #171 – Transcript – An Interview with Forrest Mims first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Dave: Welcome to the Amp Hour I’m Dave Jones from the EEV blog.
Chris: And I’m Chris Gammell of Contextual Electronics.
Henry: And I’m Henry Ott of Henry Ott Consultants.
Dave: And you nailed that intro Henry!  Well done, most of our guests goof it up in some way.  Thank you very much for coming on our show!
Chris:One of the legendary consultants of the world of EMC and noise and everything else.
Henry: I don’t know about that but I’m there, I’ve been around a while.
Dave: So can you actually tell us where you’re from and what you are doing these days and then … go back into your deep dark mysterious past?
Henry: Ok well I’m located in New Jersey, my business is pretty much all over the country – mostly the US and a little bit in Canada.  I limit myself, I don’t go overseas anymore, no sense in travelling all those distances so I kind of limit myself to the US and Canada as I say.  We do a lot of EMC training and consulting.  Probably the biggest thing I do is training classes for individual companies at their location and about twice a year we try and do a public EMC class available to anybody.  Usually one in the east coast, one in the west coast.  Just last week we had one in Detroit and the rest of my time I spend consulting.  That kind of keeps me out of trouble and keeps me busy.
Dave: You mentioned Detroit there, we’ve talked about a lot of the demise of the industry on the show.  How is the Detroit electronics industry out of curiosity?
Henry: You know, that’s a good point.  We scheduled it in Detroit shortly before the city announced the city went bankrupt, good timing right?  It wasn’t actually Detroit it was outside Dearborn ok.  I think the auto industry is coming back pretty much in that area, in the Michigan area let’s put it that way.  When we do the public classes we maybe get a third of the people from local areas and the rest is from all over the country.  0:02:52.2
Dave: Oh right they all fly in to…
Henry: Yeah as a matter of fact we had one fella from Sweden even.  Often we have some from Canada, we had 2 from Alberta from the west of Canada so quite often we have 2 or 3, or 3 or 4 of fifty people from outside the US.  It’s not just local.  I think things are a lot better in that area with the auto industry coming back, probably two years ago things were not very good.
Right is it just you in this consultancy or do you have a small group of people.  Well right at the moment it’s myself.  I have an assistant that kind of runs the office and takes care of things for me when I’m gone, answering the phone, making arrangements and doing things.  Back a few years I had another engineer working with me on it too, he worked for me for about 5 years on it but he got tired of travelling that makes it difficult in this business.
Chris: Yeah definitely.
Chris: What does the public course entail?  You said it was a week long, does it just run through the gamut of here’s EMC, here’s how you design around it, prepare for that kind of thing.  What does a course like that involve?
Henry: Ok, it’s actually a 3-day class.    I said it’s a week but I travel a day before come back the day after, so it’s a week of my time.  It’s a 3-day class, it’s pretty much a general overview of EMC.  We cover such things as grounding cabling, shielding.  Digital layout and grounding, high speed digital decoupling, big signal PCB layouts, common mode filtering, conducted emission, RF and transient immunity.  We cover pretty much gamut of different subjects, trying to make the broadest appeal.   I also do a lot of one-day classes where we just spend all day on one subject, we might talk about shielding all day or mixing a layout all day, going into more depth.  Usually the public courses I do as a general class with a bunch of different subjects. 0:05:20.7
Dave: How have the classes changed over the many decades you’ve been doing this?  We’re getting insanely high-speed digital stuff these days, which wasn’t around, really you know 20-30 years ago in terms of digital.  It was all RF – now we’re getting digital operating the RF speeds, how has that changed the game?
Henry: Well digital seems to be the big thing even today and we’re getting into more RF issues but I tend to emphasize digital in the class although a lot of the grounding, cabling, shielding is pretty much analog, or pretty much analog digital RF, whatever you want to talk about.  I pretty much I cover stuff in all industries, even though as I said we held it in the Detroit area, it really wasn’t emphasizing the automotive necessarily at all.
Dave: Interesting
Chris: It’s all analog at that point right?  It’s a digital backdrop but my inner analog guy is shouting ‘no it’s all analog!’
Henry: Well my background is analog, when I started getting into the industry digital didn’t even exist in light of what we know today.  My background is really analog, in college I specialized in feedback control systems, which are low frequency analog circuits and kind of got into business with analog frequency interference problems.  That suddenly got me knowing something about noise and interference.
Chris: Yeah that’s great.
Dave: And that’s a great segway into when you got started because you were born in , if I may say, 1936 it says in your book.
Henry: Did I put that in the book!?
Chris:  We can bleep it, we can bleep… 0:07:22.6
Henry: I think you did some investigation there or something…
Chris:Dave’s a snoop yeah.
Henry: It’s kind of interesting how I got into EMC, pretty much in a general sense the way most people that have been in it a long time , it was an accident ok.  It wasn’t any grandiose idea of doing this but I was design engineer at A&TT Bell Labs working on telecom stuff, basically audio frequency analog type stuff.
Dave: And what year was this?
Henry: What year?  Well let me go back a step further, I got out of undergraduate school I went into the air force for 3 years and then I worked for Bell Labs so we’re talking about 1960 when I started working for Bell Labs.
Chris:  Which is kind of the hey day? 50’s, 60’s was kind of the really big time
Henry: Well you’re right the 50’s 60’s 70’s yeah you’re absolutely right.  I look back …the 60’s is just when transistors and solid-state devices were coming into popular usage.  My undergraduate school we only studied vacuum tubes we studied nothing about solid state physics, now I went in the air force between undergraduate and graduate school and in graduate school we studied solid state physics.  I kinda feel that I’ve been in this business all through the solid state industry from crude to discrete transistors to integrated circuits to large scale integration etc.  I agree with you the 50, 60s, 70s and into the early 80s was the heyday of that industry.  0:09:28.2
Dave: Is that because it was driven by the money from money from the cold war?  Bell Labs did a lot of military stuff right?  That was lot of the reason for the innovation.  And then there was the space program of course.
Henry: Well that came along yeah in the 60s I guess, well mid 60s.
Dave: Yeah.
Chris:  Mid 60s actually.
Henry: It was later than that I guess..
Dave: No they landed in 69 come on Chris.
Henry: It just seemed to be the heyday of learning things about technology and electronics.  I guess if I look back it was the solid-state age.  It was the development of solid-state electronics that made space for all of the developments that went on those days.
Dave: And would you go back to those days or do you think technology these days is just so incredible that you would never want to go back to the good old days.
Henry: Well I guess we all look back and say they were the good old days, the young people today will look back on their days and say they were the good old days so I think there is something in every generation that’s the good old days.  I can talk about mine but that doesn’t mean …I’m sure there were ones before that and there will be ones after that you know.
Chris: I always think about it from the perspective of learning that kind of stuff as well. I think about the resources that are out there today with the internet and being able to access the information.  I’m continually impressed with looking at older texts and even looking from a perspective of accessibility to computing machines of calculators and stuff like that.  That’s what blows my mind is the fundamentals have to be so much stronger, whereas today, I muddle through most of the time I don’t know about you Dave but…
Dave: After 20-30 years I’m still muddling through.
Henry: You know what I think that was also the age of a lot of these large industries like Bell Labs, IBM, RCA had big research labs and privately funded, just were developing an awful lot of stuff.  There’s been a bunch of articles in magazines where have all the big research labs gone – which have pretty much all gone today.  If it doesn’t apply directly to a product nobody wants to work on it these days.  Not in the area I was in but we had large numbers of people working on something that had no end product that was obvious.  Sooner or later something probably came out of it.0:12:20.5
Dave: And how did they decide to work on those things did you have the ability to work on anything, like you woke up and had this brilliant new idea were you allowed to work on it?  How did the culture work in Bell Labs?
Henry: I think there was part of Bell Labs where that was true in the research.  I was more in the development side of Bell Labs, in the basic research they could do somewhat of what you were saying ok.  The culture there was wonderful as far as driving innovation, everybody talked to everybody, you could go into any bodies office.  One culture that Bell Labs had developed that was different from most companies at the time was other companies separated their electrical people, their mechanical people and these people.  Bell Labs intentionally mingled them all together so you would talk over a cup of coffee and somebody doing something completely different would be down the hall from you and this stuff would all get mixed up and come up with ideas that nobody had thought of you know. 0:13:26.5
Chris: That’s great, that’s one of my favorite things, obviously it’s later, but in the book Bill and Dave about HP culture which is an outcropping of Bell Labs, it’s the same kind of thing of the coffee break time 10am the bell goes off there’s the beer bus and the end of the week.  These days it’s all cube based and it’s like – alright do you work, go home, whatever no big deal. Not all companies are all like that but I feel like that’s common these days.
Henry: There’s a good book out there on the history of Bell Labs I read a year or so ago it’s called the Idea Factory.  It’s a cute title.
Chris: Oh ok, we will try and link that one in.
Chris: Yeah that’s a good one.
Henry: Yeah the Idea factory. It’s hidden somewhere in my office under something at the moment.  It’s an interesting thing that goes through the development at Bells Labs I enjoyed reading it because half of it I knew being there and about half I didn’t know because you never know everything that’s going on obviously.
Chris: Right especially with the size of Bell Labs.
Henry: Yeah the multiplicity of locations etc. so it was a big thing.
Dave: At a big company like that how did you keep in contact internally in the company?  Now there’s company email, intranets all sorts of things like that.  Pre internet and pre communications revolution, how did you know what everyone was doing internally?  Did you publish internal documents and hand them around I mean you didn’t even have photocopiers back then right?
Henry: Are you asking me was there life before email? is that the ….
Dave: Yes …well even life before photocopiers.  Even before email you would pass things around the company, photocopy it and go read this.
Henry: Obviously not as well as things go today.  Everybody wrote everything up as memos and everything was available but a lot of the interaction was as I said just personal, running into people and talking with people over lunch informally. 0:15:37.6
Chris: That sounds better.
Henry: To some extend that a better way than all these doggone emails ?
Dave: All the new-fangled yeah …I think it could be. Maybe not as efficient…
Henry: I was going to say, yes not as efficient but… If you really know what you want to communicate no, but as far as not knowing what it is you want to communicate or talk about then the answer is yes.  Over a cup of coffee just talk about who knows what and come up with something.  You’re not going to normally write an email unless you’ve got something in mind that you want to say, sometimes just a discussion.  But, I still didn’t answer the question about how I got started.  We kind of got distracted.

So I was a design engineer back there and I got involved in couple projects involving low level sensitive electronics in a noisy environment, a lot of electro mechanical stuff going on, big motors and breaks and a lot of noise.  First thing I learned is I know how to design, what I was supposed to do was electrical engineer but I had no idea how to control the noise, cause that was never taught in school and still seldom is, although there are a few universities that do.

I looked in the library there’s a little bit of information but not much so I kind of had to figure out how to overcome these problems just to do my job and suddenly I knew a little bit about noise and interference than anybody else and that kind of makes you the expert, you know.  That was kind the gist of it and suddenly everybody started to come to me because well Henry knows a little bit about that you know.  I didn’t know everything about it but I knew little bit about it. Everybody wanted to get into digital at that time because that was the new thing and I was never one to follow the crowd.  So I said, you know I like this idea about noise and interference stuff and so I kind of leaned more to getting more and more involved in that.  0:17:53.9
Dave: That was with inside Bell Labs?
Henry: Yes that was inside Bell Labs yeah.
Dave: And how long did you spend at Bell Labs all up?
Henry: I spent 30 years there.
Dave: Wow!  And then after Bell Labs?
Henry: Another couple of years and I’ll be thirty years doing my own consulting.  So I’ll have had 2 30-year careers and that’s probably enough.
Dave: & Chris Wow
Laughter
Henry: What I did in Bell Labs which I think is interesting… Bell Labs was big on continual education, they ran their own education programs and they thought it was good that everybody could learn as much as they could or wanted to and in almost any subject by the way.
So I went to the fella who was in charge of the in house education program and said ‘you know we need a course or class on noise and interference’, for lack of a better phrase.  Because engineers know how to do what they are supposed to do, design amplifiers, oscillators, in those days things like that, even digital but nobodies learned anything about noise and digital interference.  So he said ‘that’s a good idea I’ll look into it’.
Six months went by and I never heard from him and I thought well he’s forgotten about it and six months later he called me up and says ‘remember you were down here in my office and you were talking about this noise and interference stuff?’ and I said ‘well, yeah ok’.  He said ‘well I checked all our resources and nobody knows anything about it so …..’
Resources were basically two fold – they would go to the universities and get professors to come in and talk about some subject.  Then Bell Labs engineers especially were telecom related and of course neither of those knew much about this subject so being a kind of young naive engineer I said ‘well then I’ll teach one’.
Dave: Nice
Henry: And they got me into doing this stuff and after about 5 years of teaching it I had a big set of notes and I said ‘well maybe this would make a book’ and I came out with my first book ‘Noise Reduction Techniques in Electronic Systems’ back in 1976 as a result of that.   0:20:13.8
Chris: Right a classic.
Dave: Right that was the first edition, how did you write the book back then?  Did you do it on typewriter?
Laughter
Dave: I’m fascinated by how people did it back in the old days.
Henry: The first edition was ‘76 and the 2nd was ‘88.  The first edition was written by hand on paper and went to a typing pool and was typed up.
Dave: Typing pool right
Henry: That’s a silly word today right?  Exactly yeah.  The 2nd edition was done on a computer but not obviously personal.  We had terminals on our desk with one main computer at the company.
Dave: Right mainframe business.
Henry: The ‘88 second edition was done that way but the first was hand written.
Dave: What about any diagrams in it, I don’t have the first edition did the first edition have diagrams and schematics?  They were hand drawn as well and reproduced in the book photo typeset?
Henry: Our art department did most of the drawings , the Bell Labs art department. It was virtually all analog.  The first edition had about 2 paragraphs on digital.
CG: Oh that’s interesting what just because of the timing of it right?  ’76 ..
Henry: The second edition had 2 chapters on digital and now my present book is now half on digital so interesting how times have changed there.  But you know some very fundamental things like shielding and grounding are things that are the same for analog or digital just the frequency components are different.  One advantage I had is that a lot of the things in the book were very basic and they last even if technology changes even if maybe some of the applications weren’t very realistic at that point.
CG: So that was actually published through Bell Labs, that was another component of the learning program there?  How does that work?
Henry: It was published by Wiley, John Wiley and Sons.   Bells Labs was very encouraging, you want to write a book go right ahead.  They had to approve the manuscript you know.  You weren’t giving away any secrets or anything you know.
Dave: So this was 1988 – is there any ideas about a third edition?  Is it needed?
Henry: The second edition in 1988 came out right after I left Bell Labs, but I wrote it while I was at Bell Labs.
Dave: So the copyright that’s why it’s got copyright Bells Labs
Henry: The copyright says Bell Labs on it yeah. I started a third edition of it and that turned out to be my new book Electromagnetic Compatibility Engineering.
Dave: Oh ok
Henry: The newest one 2009  I had completely rewritten almost all but three of the original chapters and I added six more chapters to the book and it was a completely different book in my mind so we renamed it.  It’s almost a 900 page book.
Dave: So are the two book different?  People should get both?  They are actually complimentary?
Henry: No, because you really don’t need both.  The new one pretty much includes everything that was in the old one plus a lot more implicit up to date stuff.  it started out as the third edition but then the way things changed…
I look at it the Noise reduction techniques and Electronic Systems was my experiences at Bell Labs and Electromagnetic Compatibility Engineering is my experiences after Bell Labs, after I had left there.
Dave: Any you’ve got a quote in the second edition “Everything should be made as simple as possible but no simpler’ –  Albert Einstein.
Henry: That’s from albert Einstein.
Dave: Yes. Why did you decide to put that in?  In what way …
Henry: That’s in all 3 books.  Well you know, a lot of people writing books on cabling and shielding were writing with a lot of theory and very complicated and my approach was to try and simplify it.
CG: We liked that.
Henry: I wanted to be able to understand it as the design engineer myself.  So that’s been part of my success I think.  I wrote all of the books, and this is the honest truth, for me to understand and read.  Most design engineers appreciate that so I thought kind of what I did was try and make a complicated subject simple so I put that quote in.
Dave: Got it.  So you don’t really need all that complicated field theory to do practical EMC stuff?  Are there any cases where you do need to get deep into the theory of it?
Henry: First of all you’re right – you don’t need all of that.  You need a little bit of theory if you want it to be more than a cookbook.  0:25:48.1
Dave: Right
Henry: And that’s kind of what I tried to do.  I don’t think very much in the EMC business you need much of that theory at all.  It’s good to know some of that because it may lead you in certain directions etc.  The reason you got there might have been through some complicated theory but once you get there and understand that you can simplify it.
Dave: That applies to most aspects to most aspects of electronics engineering not just yeah.  That’s why ‘the Art of Electronics’ book is so popular because they deliberately don’t include any of the heavy math.  I don’t think you’ll find a single integral in the whole book. I think that’s the reason for their success.  Otherwise it’s a book for teaching – it’s not a book for the practical engineer.
Henry: Well if you think about it who writes most of the technical books?  Often Universities.  They are writing more the theoretical and you don’t get as many practicing engineers – at least back in those days you didn’t – actually writing the books.  I think they do their job and they go off on….If I hadn’t taught it I probably wouldn’t have written a book.  I had a whole set of notes and thought this is probably useful for something and maybe we could turn it into a book.
Chris: As you were developing these notes how did you go through and start digging into this stuff?  Because some of your stuff in this book and your technical articles on your site they’re awesome, because that’s the practical stuff I use all the time like the mixed signal layout stuff.  Where do you connect ground plans underneath abcs, doing that kind of stuff.  There’s so much conflicting information and there’s so much just information out there, how did you develop that course?
Henry: Especially on that mixed signal one is a good example and it’s a whole chapter in the new book on mixed signal.  All of a sudden I seemed to get a bunch of consulting jobs with people with mixed signal problems you know?  There was always some and then it seemed to come together all at once I got 3 or 4 in a row and I think my experience is often the problem of the year.  Everybody seems to have this problem this year and that problem next year and I realized there was not a lot of good information.
I wrote little write up on my webpage about and I got a call maybe 6-7 months later.  An editor from Printed Circuit Design magazine, he said I saw this thing on mixed signal on you webpage.  Would you be willing to expand that into an article on Printed Circuit Design?  That was a good excuse to work on that more.  So I did that I wrote a little 4 page article July 2001 Printed Circuit Design Magazine.  From that I developed a course from it, so it kind of just went on and on and on you know.  I think a lot of the things were like that because of problems I ran across in my consulting business.  Some of the problems I didn’t know the answers to and then I kind of worked on them or I developed better answers to them.
Chris: Yeah maybe your fourth book you shouldn’t quote Einstein you should quote Nothing is as powerful as an idea whose idea has come – except you modify it.  “Nothing is as powerful as someone who wants to pay you to solve their problem” right?
Henry: I wasn’t smart enough to say that though or do that at that point.
Dave: Do you have any idea how many copies of the book have been sold?
Henry: Yeah.  You know a lot of technical books like that especially if they are not standard university texts like basic physics don’t sell large quantities at least like popular books fiction or something.  The first 2 editions – I’ve done well selling those books for the market they are in.  The first 2 editions of noise reduction techniques probably combined sold 60-70,000 copies.
Chris: Impressive.
Dave: Wow  Nice… That’s good for a technical book.
Henry: The new one EMC just came out in 2009, that’s probably 5-6000 copies total at the moment. I expect it to get better in the long run.  0:31:12.9
Dave: Got it.  As you said it really needs to be integrated as part of a some basic course and things like that cause that’s how most people get these books.  It’s the textbook they got during their course on that particular subjects.
Henry: There are a couple of universities and colleges that are beginning to teach it as part of an graduate or undergraduate, usually it’s a senior elective or something.  The University of Michigan in Dearborn is one of them.
I’m gonna start putting some stuff on my web page about that for people that … so colleges or universities or even other consultants as well as myself are using the book for teaching EMC as a resource if somebody is looking for an education there.  I hope that’s something we are going to work on adding to the webpage.
While I’m on the subject of books I’d like if you’ve got a second here … right now there’s a lot of EMC books on the market and I get this listed on my webpage too.  I got what I call my 3 book EMC library.  You can buy a lot of books and there’s something good about every book, some people cover some things better than others, but obviously there’s a lot of overlap if they are all on the same subject.
I got three book that if you buy them on the subject of Electromagnetic Compatibility Engineering and single integrity it covers the subject from DC light frequency wise and there’s very little overlap and they are all very easy to ready and I think that’s a big advantage.  If you want to limit yourself to just 3 books I give you a recommendation, my Electromagnetic Compatibility Engineering would be the basic book, then there’s a book called High Speed Digital Design by Johnson and Graham
Chris: Is that Dr Howard Johnson?
Dave: Yes it is, you’re familiar with him.  I know him very well.
Dave: We’ve had him on the show as you are, he’s been on the who talking abou this book.
Henry: Oh ok fine, he’s the single integrity guy up in Spokane Washington area. Him and Dr Marty Graham, I know Marty Graham very well – retired now from Berkeley University in Ca.  I consider that a crossover book, it’s kind of a lot of EMC issues and beginning to talk about some single integrity issues. It’s got a bunch of interesting measurements that’s not in another book and it’s also easy to read so…  All the books I’ve got other than my own, I use that book the most and then there’s a third one if you are interested in the real high frequency stuff single integrity as things are getting more and more today, with almost the same title it’s called High Speed Digital System Design, the word system is in there and it’s by three authors, Hall, Hall and McCall.
0:34:37.5 Inaudible.  Overspeaking.
Henry: A lot of single integrity books are very theoretical but this is a very readable book and I loved the first sentence of the book and I wished I’d thought of it.  Out of a clear blue sky, the first sentence of the book says ‘the speed of light is just too slow’.
Laughter
Chris: That’s great
Henry: It really sets up the thing about what the book is about.  Those three books cover an awful lot without overlapping a lot, there’s a lot of other stuff you can get but …
Dave: Are you still doing research into the subject these days?  Is there always more to learn?  Do you build stuff and measure things?
Henry: Do I?  You know my research is mostly in doing consulting and sometimes I’ll get an interesting problem that I’ll work on the side, you know kind of develop some other ways to do it but …not really a lot you know between doing the training, classes and consulting that pretty much keeps me busy.
Dave: Got it
Henry: When I got a little hour free or something you guys wanna talk to me.
Chris: We appreciate it laughter.
Dave: You’re a busy man.
Henry: I think you gotta keep into the consulting business that keeps me down to the real world of what’s going on.  If I just wrote books, you kind of miss what’s going on in the real world.  That kind of drives where … like the mixed signal as I had a couple of consulting jobs with problems that got me to write the stuff on mixed signal etc.  Had I not had that I probably would never have written the stuff specifically on mixed signal.
Chris: We have some questions from the audience that we should include.
Henry: Ok I’ll try and give them a shot.
Chris: So big question I always have as well, FEWS on the forum wrote about.  He was wondering about recommendations on shielding and shielding cans and specifically…  He heard that they can cause resonant cavities when soldered under ground planes, is this true or a myth?  Then there’s a whole bunch of other questions.  Then having to double as heat sinks …   well let’s start with that first one perhaps.  0:37:18.4
Henry: Can it be a resonant cavity?  Sure any shielded box can be a resonant cavity.  So what? It still serves a purpose and … almost everything has a plus and a minus to it and that’s one example but that doesn’t mean not using them… I would not think about stopping using them or anything.
Dave: You just have to be careful and you have to know about them.
Henry: Yeah that’s important thing to know.  I know when I talk about grounding … grounding is a very complicated thing and I don’t want to get into it here….. I always make the point grounding is a compromise.  Every ground system that you and I have designed has faults.
Chris: It’s got to go somewhere right?
Henry: It has advantages .. the name of the game is trying to balance the advantages against the faults for the application.  I know some people would argue with you and say that this type of ground has got this fault and this fault and I’d say ‘yeah but give me a better choice for the application’ and they don’t have it.
Dave: Exactly
Henry: But it’s important as you say to at least to understand the faults and the limitations and as part of your design and testing to make sure it’s not hurting you.
Dave: That’s right, because when you finally test your product and you getting some unusual problem on there like there’s resonant cavities, it’s oscillating it’s frequency and you’re getting a weird you know test your thing sweep it over frequency and you’re getting whoah what happened there at 2 Ghz..
Henry: You get something like that so maybe you gotta put something inside your can to break up the resonance or something like that but still serving the job of acting as a shield  yeah
Dave: But you’ve got to know that it could be caused by the resonant cavity effect otherwise you might think ooh is there a 2 ghz transmitter around here somewhere
Henry: Well you’re right, that’s why I always say you want to know the negatives as well as the positives to whatever you are doing.
Chris: I had a co worker talking to me – I mentioned you were going to be on the show today and we were just talking about EMI testing and being in anechoic chambers and stuff like that and just sometimes you put a piece of copper tape somewhere and it fixes one problem and the noise screams out another side.
Henry: That’s absolutely true, you know you push in here on the balloon it pops out over there.
Laughter
Henry: That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t fix this problem, then you can fix the other one.
CG: Well your boss is going at you one day ….You gotta make him happy that day and the next day he yells at you for something else ….
Dave: We’re in a boat and it’s leaking and there’s a 1000 holes and you’re trying to plug them all before it sinks….
Laughter
Dave: Oh goodness..
Henry: Absolutely
Chris: So you said you primarily have development background, is that from the hands on practical approach?  I could imagine that someone with a more theoretical background being like well lets go back to first principles and stuff like that was it because of the development background that you had?
Henry: I think so, as a teenager I’ve always been hands on building things and doing things.  I got into engineering, my interest in theory is so that I can build something or make something not in for the theory itself.  I come at it bottom up and some of the university people come at it from the top down you know.  With the theory down I start from the practical up, you gotta know enough theory from the practical to know what you are doing.
Dave: Do you think they’re not teaching enough of that these days ?  Are you getting a lot of young graduates in your courses?
Henry: We get everything from young to old and .. I think engineering education does have a problem today.  You can get a Bachelors or Masters, even a PhD in some places without ever studying a field theory course or anything like that.  Especially in computer science where they just talk ones and zeros.  I think, it’s hard to argue there’s so much to study, I’m not saying you shouldn’t do that but they are taking out a lot of the fundamental stuff I think because they are saying fewer and fewer people need it you know.  0:41:46.6
Dave: Right because there’s so many off the shelf solutions out there, we take it for granted that we can just go to Digikey and buy 200,000 chips that do everything that’s basically a module, a plug …
Henry: I kind of worked through this whole solid- state development.  When I started working in solid-state we designed transistor circuits to a transistor, now it’s more like a system thing here everything is in a box called an IC and all you do is interconnect a bunch of boxes you know?  You don’t necessarily know what’s going on at the device level.
Chris: See the only think that I think that’s different these days … see I think about your mixed signal article I’ve read 3 or 4 times in the past year at least.  This is where the rubber really hits the road for me at least right, because I am just integrating these Ics and I am just connecting up these boxes but then it comes down to that point of well I know ground loops are a thing.. I want to make sure I have that right and then you kind of get to that point and you start focusing on this problem and your whole world explodes because it goes from I have this simple chip it seems like to start with and if I step …
Henry: It suddenly becomes complicated. 0:43:05.4
Chris: Exactly, it opens up the entire world of ‘oh crud what the heck am I going to do about all the things that could go wrong’.  The fall back of course is to go back to the vendor and be like – ‘do you have recommended designs?’  but then if you have to move outside of that then you have to …
Henry: You’re right and that’s the problem as I say.  A lot of people aren’t learning the fundamentals today.  Look at digital logic, the digital design there’s the 1 state and 0 state right.  There are no EMC problems in the 1 state and none in the 0 state.  All the EMC problems occur in the transition and the transition is an analog state that the digital designer thinks does not exist.
Chris: Right
Dave: And it’s much higher frequency than your 1/0 rate… transition rate.
Henry: Right because digital designers are RF designers and don’t know it.
CG: Well the good ones are.
Henry: The good RF designers know what they are doing, they are doing RF and they understand it, but the digital people don’t think they are doing that.
Chris: Yeah I have a firmware guy I work with and he’s ‘oh we hit a problem lets pull out the logic analyzer’  and I’m like ‘yeah that works when you need to know what word you have when the signal’s clean.  There’s a whole lot of other stuff going on ….’
Dave: Lets get the oscilloscope instead of the logic analyzer.
Henry: Doesn’t help you much with noise interference or EMC.
Chris: Do you have go to tools?  We always like talking about test gear and stuff like that on here. Do you have go to tools that you recommend to people that are maybe starting out.
Henry: Like software tools?
Chris: Oh no I mean like hardware tools, like specific scope types for chasing down EMC problems.
Henry: Yeah some small probes, little magnetic loop probe to probe.. we use a communal current probe that goes on cables to measure the unbalanced current  on the cable that causes them to radiate.
Dave: Almost nobody would have one of those in the lab.  That’s one of the problems.  That’s the problem right.  It’s not general purpose kit?  Should it be?  Should the scope manufacturers actually be providing one of those?
Henry: Yeah and people don’t know what to measure if they were to measure from an EMC point of view.
Dave: Exactly
Henry: Cause the other thing is, those two probes and the spectrum analyzer engineers often don’t know how to use a spectrum analyzer.  You learn using the oscilloscope in school and the volt meter.
Chris: Yeah right.
Henry: The spectrum analyzer is a complete other beast
Chris: I muddle through with you know like a lot of the new scopes have FFTs on them. That’s kind of the best I can do with you know …see some frequency content … do what I can.
Henry: I used to always say that the big problem price wise here is spectrum analyzers but we now have some really good ones that are very inexpensive.
Dave: Yeah they are down to 1400 dollars or something.  Well you can get a, one I often mention to people is a Riegold.
Dave: Is it a Riegold 815.  Yeah   Yeah I’ve got one of those here in the lab it’s only 1400 including tracking generator.
Henry: Yeah and that’s a well built thing, works very well got a good frequency response.  It’s not a cheap spectrum analyzer it’s an inexpensive analyzer.  There’s a difference right.  It’s well built, there’s no excuse because a scope costs more than that today.  A decent scope, at least as much as that so people …..
One of the one day classes I do is on a thing called workbench EMC measurements.  Measurements that you make in your lab that relate to EMC.  A lot of people are interested in that because like I say they don’t do these things … they don’t know what to do.  0:47:30.4
Dave: Right
Henry: They don’t know what they are looking for or what equipment to use.  There’s a  whole chapter in my new book on pre compliance EMC measurements – all done with simple equipment.
Dave: Yeah that’s a big thing these days cause you want to ensure that your design is at least in the ball park before you go and spend 10s of 1000s of dollars getting it compliance test.
Henry: That’s correct but you know how many people don’t do that they go and spend $10,000 and go … clarify* in detail.  And quite often they fail so bad that you could have found out in minutes if you just did a couple quick tests yourself.
Chris: So you’re saying that your book is going to save people $10,000? I say that right there should be your sticker on the front.  0:48:15.4
Henry: You read that one chapter. 0:48:18.8
Chris: Exactly
Dave: Is there any really common mistake that people make at that EMC, that causes them to fail EMC compliance.
Henry: Sure – there’s about 10 different things, let me just give you a couple.  By the way I have an appendix in that new book.  I was going to put the 10 most common EMC problems but kind of sounds a dull subject.  I wrote the appendix – the 10 best ways to maximize the emission from your product.  Do this do that do the other thing.
Laughter
Chris: That’s great.
Henry: Now the books been out since what 2009, 4 years now and I got one email now just the other day from a guy says – ‘I was reading that appendix – aren’t we supposed to minimize the emissions?’  He doesn’t get it.  The idea was to invert it and you know make it a little more interesting.
Dave: Awesome
A lot of EMC people read it and think it’s great because they say there’s so much truth in that people do this and I kind of prefixed that in the beginning. I don’t think this appendix is needed because most people do this anyhow, so they don’t need me to tell them.
So let me give you  a couple.  Basically what I referred to was an interrupter return current path where you run traces across splits in planes.  If the adjacent planes got a split in it, the return current should be right underneath the trace.   See everybody thinks about the signal current but everybody forgets about the return current.
Chris: Oh yeah definitely
Henry: If it’s right under the trace it’s nice small loop that’s a good thing but if there’s split in that plane or slot in that plane there, that causes major problems ok.   The second one would be terminating shielded cables improperly with long pigtails.  Along with pigtails at all – it should be 360 degree termination.
Chris: Right  Just those two things would make tremendous differences if people would realize and correct those things.
Dave: Traps for young players.
HO: Two good pieces of advice I think.
Chris: Yeah, do you visualize current like a train, like a bullet train?  Cause that’s how I do it.. I think about where the currents going and where it doesn’t want – “ want” to go and if it runs into something it doesn’t like it’s going to be like ‘ no I’m going to start radiating like crazy cause it’s going to do everything it can to get across there…’
Laughter
Henry: Well I don’t know that I looked at it like that but the net effect is the same.
Dave: The way I look at it is always loop area – how big is your loop?  You always want to minimize …
Henry: That’s kind of what I do….I look at loop area.  But see how many people look at the signal part of the trade and as long as there’s a ground symbol on both ends, they figure somehow it gets , they never give a microsecond of thought to where that return current is flowing.   Somewhere in the ground right?
Chris: Yeah, I’ve seen people suggest that they actually draw individual ground returns for beginners especially, so that there’s a really clear concept of it’s not going into some ether and below your board – it’s going back – it’s gotta go back!  HO: So many people think that ground is a one way thing and you can just dump current into it and it disappears and that’s not exactly true.
Dave: I’ve done a video on that where I use a current chasing probe and I chase the return current through a ground plane and you can show that look no current flows down this area here it’s all flowing there and people just go ‘oh wow I didn’t know that I had no idea.’
Henry: Yep, yep
Dave: The flip side for that’s like one of those wow moments for people … my latest video is measuring noise in op amps and the feedback is like ‘hmm who cares I don’t want to know about that stuff, go away give me something interesting!’  I find that a bit disappointing because I think it’s important to know about noise in op amps for example and the different types but a lot of people seem to think this is boring stuff unfortunately.  How do we get them to be more excited by it?  I guess they need to have been bitten right.  They need to have a problem where… they have to be bitten on the bum.
Henry: I guess so, that’s an important issue, important point here.  How do you get people to realize it’s important this whole subject.
Dave: I know – have you got any advice?
Chris: Maybe we can open that up to the comment section ….
Henry: A good friend of mine Dr Clayton Paul who taught at the university of Kentucky and Mercer University, just passed away last year a sad, sad thing but he was a real good EMC guy and a real good professor.  He used to teach an EMC class and he had a real hard time getting students to attend the class because they didn’t think it was important, ya know?  He said I gotta find a way to get them to attend the class.  So he also had a basic circuits class he taught that had a lab associated with it.  They’d build a little digital something as part of the la.  He got the idea he said we’re going to build this little thing let’s say it’s a counter with a readout or something but instead of putting it on one board he put it on two boards with a meter long cable between them.  0:54:24.3
Chris: Cool
Dave: Nice
Henry: Everybody did that and they made it work and maybe the first thing they ever built they made work and they knew everything in the world and then he had arrangements with IBM in Lexington and he brought them over to the EMC lab and he measured the radiation from them and said you couldn’t sell this thing anywhere in the world.  And you know after that his EMC class would fill up.
Chris: Ill bet
Henry: Now they relate that maybe this is something that I should learn about.  You know a lot of engineers in the field don’t appreciate the importance of EMC, surely the students don’t. They haven’t got that level yet of understanding some of the other things yet, so EMC is the least of their concerns.
Chris: Personally I get away with a lot from being lower speed kind of stuff.  That definitely helps.  I think from the grace of, like I said before, app notes, having suggested layout, that kind of stuff that takes people a lot further than it used to right where maybe they weren’t as good as application departments but it’s just glossing over stuff.  It’s still there, these things are determined at some point but it’s just either pulled into chips application departments or it pops out later once the engineer doesn’t realize it when they go EMI testing.
Henry: Yep, especially in the high frequency stuff.
Chris: Oh yeah, what about DC to DC  stuff?  We were just talking about loops and stuff like that, whenever I hear loops I immediately think of DC to DC control circuits…
Dave: Switching regulator
Chris: Switching regulator that kind of stuff.
Henry: DC DC converters, like I said, very noisy stuff and that produces a lot of conducted noise problems.  I’ll tell you another thing right along those lines that pretty much behaves like that is coming into fashion is variable frequency motor drives.
Dave: Oh yes
Henry: Where they control the phases of … the speed of 3 phase ac motors electronically.  Matter fact those motor drives are basically almost like DC and DC or AC to DC convertors but instead of producing a voltage as the output they produce a drive to the motor and they get all the switching noises so I see a lot of problems with that recently.  And that’s the automotive industry too cause that’s where you have your drives on your electric car.
Dave: Oh really yeah that’s a big deal.
Henry: In fact in the beginning when people were talking electric cars I figured they got DC motors.  They got 3 phases electric motors, 400 volt 3 phase electric motors. That’s a lot of ..
Dave: They are portable EMC generators!
Henry: Absolutely
Dave: Is there any industry emission requirements for those instead of exhaust emissions, EV car radiation standards.
Henry: There are.
Dave: Are the automotive industry actually going to have their own standards for that or is it just like the regular FCC requirement.  Do you treat a car as a regular product?
Henry: Yeah car is regular product. There’s a lot of them around!  It doesn’t come under FCC by the way.  The European Union has their own requirements on it, the car manufacturers are required to meet and most of the car manufacturers have their own requirements.  Interestingly enough as far as radiated emissions more stringent than the FCC.  Why do they do it even more stringent?  Well they got small space called a car and the antennae sticking up with an AM FM radio.  When you buy a $20,000 car you expect your radio to work without noise and static.  I don’t know why you have that crazy idea ….  Simple thing is you cant listen to the radio comfortably, is a reason to downgrade that car.
Dave: Yeah of course
Henry: They put emission requirements on themselves that are 40db below the government’s.
Wow
Henry: Right because damn antennae is sitting right next to the microprocessor that’s in the car!
Chris: I’ve heard about new parts coming out actually where they tune the DC to DC to chase the am or FM tuner effectively so that it’s always a certain amount away from the switching … must have been am cause of the switching frequency but they chase that around so as your tune your radio it doesn’t pick that up which is brilliant.
Henry: Yep
Dave: Once again there’s a problem that’s solved by one of these chips and then you don’t understand it from the design point of view.
Henry: Automotive usually does a good job even on susceptibility because you drive your car maybe down tot he airport or by a building that’s got a big FM transmitter on the roof you may drive through a very strong field.  You don’t want your engine to stall…
Dave: Or your air bags going off!
Henry: Or you don’t want your cruise control to go crazy.. so automotive has a lot .. originally started out as self imposed restrictions just because of what the product is… what the customers perception of what the product is and what they expect.
Dave: Is there a big difference in terms of traps for young players between conducted and radiation emissions? Which do you find more troublesome?  Do more people have problems with radiated emissions or conducted?  1:00:50.1
Henry: Radiated.  Conducted is mostly below 30 MHz, radiated is above.  You know where the conducted is coming out.  On the power line so you know it’s the filter.
Dave: Of course any cable coming out unless you’ve got a sealed box.
Henry: But radiated could be anywhere, radiated could be in multiple cables, radiated could be through the enclosure etc. so it’s a lot harder to control so most designs are the controls are conducted well.  Clearly the radiated is more of a problem. Then there’s always somebody that’s got the opposite when you just look at all the problems in the world, radiated is more of problem.
Dave: Then there’s a lot of people who think I’ll just whack it in a shielded box and I’m done right?
Chris: They cage everything!
Dave: I think you’ve got an excellent graph somewhere in your book that demonstrates the different types of shielded materials and the frequencies they operate over if I remember that correctly.  So you might think ok I’ve put it inside an aluminum box but that only works over a certain frequency range – is that right?
Henry: Well it’s mostly the apertures, the problem is the shielded box has got seams and apertures.  Designing a good shielded box is not the simplest thing.  And if you have taken the approach you just said you probably are not designing a good shielded box. Besides that, cables go in and out that bypass a shielded box.
Dave: That’s it, that’s it.
Henry: So you not only got a design a good shield but you have to filter all the cables.  Ignoring proper design and just using a shielded box is not the optimum way of designing anything cost wise or anything else usually.  But you’re right a lot of people say as a last resort will just put in a shielded box.
Dave: So what is the proper way to get a good shielded box do you solder all the complete seam around outside?
Henry: That would work fine but not very practical.
Dave: No that’s right
Henry: You gotta limit the maximum dimension of any seam or aperture cooling hole in order to limit the radiation through it.  Especially in seams you’ve gotta have a conductive finish on the seams so when they push together they make contact etc. Designing a good shielded box is not a trivial job.
Dave: Right so you cant just get a die cast LO box and then just screw on the lid and think that you’re going to get performance from DC to daylight.
Chris: Nor just tin foil like I would do.
Henry: Well you know at high frequency the thickness of tin foil is fine it’s not really the thinness it’s just they end up making it a really good enclosure with no penetrations of it.
Dave: So you don’t really have to worry about radiated emissions below generally about 30 MHz you not going to get too many issues?
Henry: Well not regulatory wise.  The regulation do radiated emission testing above 30 and conducted emissions below 30.
Dave: Got it.
Henry: Now there’s always exceptions to that.
Dave: Like AM radio in your car for example
Henry: Yeah right but the rationale for that is that most products are not big enough to be efficient antennae’s below 30mghz.
Chris: Ahh just because of wavelength that kind of thing.
Henry: So the radiation from them isn’t too much of a problem.  However the ac power line they are connected is a big antennae.  I cant very well measure the radiation of the power line and not pick up anybody else’s radiation so they are going to tell you how much you can excite the power line.  That’s really the conducted emission test.  The conducted emission test is really a radiated emission test in disguise. 1:04:56.8
Dave: Right, are there any common traps that people fall into in terms of mains powered products?  Is it adequate just to put in one of those IEC mains input filters there and be done with it, wipe your hands and go ah that should be enough.
Henry: Well if you mount it properly and ground it properly and it’s a good designed filter it might be – there’s a lot of times you can get away with doing that.  You know what I find mostly with filters is power line filters, is they are not mounted well and they got too much parasitic impedance.
Dave: Oh in terms of the connection of the metal case of the filter …
Henry: Referring to the metal box of the filter to the chassis or I’ve seen people take the power lead into the filter and the power lead out of the filter and wrap them together.  So you couple the all the energy around the filter basically ..
Dave: Exactly you’ve just got capacitive coupling right there.
Henry: It looks nice, it looks nice married like that.
Chris: You get the sticker too right?
Henry: I would say interesting on power line filters, an interesting subject I would ay 90% of the times I fixed a conducted emission problem with a filter,  it’s mechanically not electrically, it’s the mounting or the wiring.
Dave: The physical wiring and people forget about the capacitive couple in between the wires when they tie them all together.  It just sneaks right past the filter it just bypasses it.
Henry: Unless you had a really noisy product and you buy a commercial power line filter, the power line manufacturers have got those filters down pretty damn good.
Henry: If you implement them properly and use them properly.  You can almost do as you said just put them in a forget them.  But it’s so easy not to put them in right and mount them right so it doesn’t actually always work out that way all the time.
Dave: How many people actually come to you screaming ‘help my product doesn’t work!’  Is that the majority of your business?
Chris: Yeah I was wondering about that to…
Henry: Well no  I’ll tell you why , there’s a lot of people that do that .. we do a lot of training classes what that means is I’ve often got  a lot of commitments next week or the week after – like next week I’m going be in Tucson doing a class for somebody.  Last week I was in the Detroit area.  So if somebody wants it fixed next week I say I cant do it – you know because I got other commitments.  If it’s real quick emergency I usually don’t end up doing it because my schedule is such that I can’t … besides I’m not crazy about those kind of crisis problems.
Dave: Right Yeah yeah.
Henry: Although I work with people fixing things after the fact usually when they are in as much of a hurry but the ideal thing is working before the fact.  Coming up with something new and lets kind of try and do it right to begin with.
Dave: Do you charge like an idiot tax?
Laughter
Dave: They have been on your course and they completely ignore everything you’ve said!
Chris: You did not listen to me!!
Henry: That’s a good term too. I think I should I’d probably be rich if I’d did that.  Every once in a  while I charge somebody extra cause he made me work on Sunday – he wanted it done.
Chris: Oh jeez yeah.
Henry: Some consultants, if you hire them and they tell you something and you don’t do it they get upset.  I don’t.  My feeling is you hire me, you wanted to know what I think is wrong, how to fix it I tell you.  I did my job, I earned my money now it’s your responsibility to do it or ignore it, I don’t care.  I don’t get upset – I know people do get bent out of shape about that.  I don’t care I did a good job and earned my money I feel happy with what I did.
Chris: You’ll happily come back and tell them the second time right.
Henry: If you choose not to follow my advice, that’s ok.  Be my guest.  Sometimes they don’t and sometimes they do.  More often they do than don’t  but there are examples of both.  Or a lot of times I don’t know because you tell them something then go away and don’t hear from them.  So either they are mad at me or everything’s fine
Chris: No thank you notes!?
Dave: How much of a big deal is ESD these days?
Henry: These days?  It  has always been a problem.  The European Union has mandatory requirements for ESD, the US did not on commercial products.  I do a reasonable amount of ESD consulting for clients.  1:10:10.8
Dave: Are there any common problems, traps that people fall into in that they haven’t protected their gear properly?
Henry: Well a lot of that … two fold – some mechanical  you want to try and keep the ESD out as much as possible and putting breakdown filters and things on IO cables etc. number one.  What I do, I go and put filter son the digital logic on the rests and interrupts and things like that so even if the transient gets in it doesn’t upset the logic.  The ESD problem is one of setting the logic and having it change state.
Chris: So is there a way you discern between one kind of signal, obviously I mean resets a good one.  Do you do chip selects as well for a SPI bus clarify* Like a chip select on a SPI bus?  Would that be something you would do? More internal to a part?  Or is it mostly the outward facing where the human interaction …
Henry: I do two things, where the cables enter I try and protect that and then I go and try to protect the sensitive IC devices and that’s kind of my approach to go both places.
Chris: That’s good thinking.
Dave: Do people have a lot of issues these days with low level component noise and stuff like that?  Is that a big issue these days or are people beyond that because it’s all designed out because of the system blocks they’ve got these days.
Henry: I guess what do you mean by low level component noise?
Dave: Like op amp noise, thermal noise….
Henry: The inherent, intrinsic noise.
Dave: Yes intrinsic noise sorry yes.
Henry: Yes matter fact there’s a chapter in the book on that .. Not as much, you normally only get that if you are measuring very very very small signals.
Dave: It’s more of a niche market kind of thing.
Henry: That’s a very specific type of application.
Dave: That can get really tricky.
Chris: Yes it can.  Laughs
Henry: Every once in a while I did do some consulting for a company that measuring very very small signals and that can be an issue there, that’s not a big issue that I get involved in nowadays – I don’t see it a lot.
Dave: I always find it amazing how the manufacturers analog devices will come  out with the worlds lowest noise op amp and I’m going well ‘how the hell did you measure that – how did you characterize that?’
Henry: That’s true, that’s a lot of work and it’s difficult.
Dave: It’s almost black magic.
Chris: Like Keithley gear man
Dave: Some Keithley gear, well how did Keithley measure their own gear you know?
Chris: Metrology sciences are crazy.
Dave: You’ve got it.
Chris: One last question – we’re getting out there in terms of time.  So you are a lifetime member of the IEEE?  What does that mean?
Laughter
Henry: A member until I die!
Dave: It means he’s been a member for a lifetime.  When did the IEEE start?  I don’t even know.
Henry: Let me answer the lifetime question first.  What that means is you get your dues free. You stop paying them and lifetime of the IEEE society you can attend the symposiums for free.
Chris: Oh nice.
Henry: So there are some nice advantages to that.  That’s usually a result of being a member for along time.
Chris: Buy forty years get twenty free, that’s a good deal I like that.
Henry: You talked about when the IEE started, well when I was in college there were two professional organizations.  AIEE – American association of engineers and the IRE which was institute of radio engineers.
Dave: No mention of the word electronics back then!
Henry: See the AIEE back then the two bridges of electrical engineering were power and RF.  The AIEE was the power organization and the IRE was the RF organization and in 1963 they combined to become the IEEE.
Dave: Ahh got it.
Henry: So it’s a combination of those two professional organizations.  So the answer is 1963 and it’s a combination of those two.  So if you were a member of one or the other you ended up a member of the IEEE.  1:15:54.8
Dave: Are there any more books in the planning stages?
Henry:What that I’m working on or I’m thinking about?
Dave: Yeah
Henry: I’m thinking.  Laughs.
Dave: Or is just too hard cause it takes years to write a technical book right?
Henry: Yeah really it does.  The last one I came out with took me 3 and a half years basically, plus I’m working doing consulting work and everything too.  It’s an awful lot.  I put off doing it because as I say it started as a third edition, the publisher was after me to do a third edition and I just new how much work was involved.  I didn’t want to commit myself.  I finally said, if I’m ever going to do it I gotta do it.  I decide to do it – I go slow on doing that.  I have a though with another fella maybe we are going to come up with something I don’t know.
Chris: Sweet
Dave: Got it.
Henry: It will probably be on antennae’s if it’s what I’m thinking about. Something different – simplified antennae theory.
Chris: Oh I like that.
Dave: That will be nice yeah are there any good books on that at the moment?
Henry: Well not on simplified – there’s a lot of good antennae books but they are all very loaded with theory you know.
Dave: Of course  yeah – well I’d certainly buy that.
Chris: I would too.
Dave: Cause that’s another thing people don’t understand!
Henry: I kind of took a lot of the stuff and tried to simplify it and maybe that’s the thought of doing that with antennas also.
Chris: Could you do that with everything cause that would be great for me…
Dave: What subjects in electronics do you think are in need of a real simplified text.  Have you noticed anything in the field that needs a simplified text, that’s cryingout for a simplified book?  Antennas being one?
Henry: I think in any subject you could do that.
Dave: Excellent, Digital for Dummies?
Henry: I was going to ay all those ‘For Dummies’ books …Now some of them are too simple but a lot of them are good you know.  I think if you get the right people who know how to do it you could have a book on simplified everything.
Dave: Is that, you know the practicing engineer.  Most people do their engineering study and then they go into the world and they actually make things.  is that all they have to worry about these days is the practical side of things?  Do they have to go deep into the theory anymore?  Especially in the education side of things should they be teaching more practical stuff?
Henry: Yeah well I think education should cover more practical stuff but the universities tend to think otherwise, in general.  Don’t get me wrong it is important, understanding theory and developing .. like some of the exotic communication codes we use, modulation schemes, even FM radio is something fairly complicated to understand until the people worked out the math.
You often need the complicated theory to work out some of these schemes but then once we understand the schemes there is no reason you cant simplify it is what I say.  I don’t think you can come up with everything in the world without knowing a lot of the complicated theory but once we get something I think we can simplify it down to amore understandable thing.  I think frequency modulation would be a good example of that.
Dave: Who was it Chris that we had on about the TV stuff was it Ron?
Chris: Yeah Ron, Ron Quan and he’s actually doing a book on FM I think.
Dave: Yeah he is doing a simplified book … and just the art and science that went into the Beta and VHS video recording schemes.  Very complex stuff behind that – phenomenal.
Henry: Yeah that’s a very good example yeah.
Dave: Do you think that there’s any hope of the Bell style research labs coming back in favor?
Henry: That’s a good question, a real good question.  I think when they were here they were a national resource, do I think they are going to come back – no.  I think everybody is too focused on the short term.
Dave: Profit, product and what product can we get out in the next nine months.
Henry: More and more – it was the next year and then 9 months, 6 months , 3 months I think.  If you can’t get it on the market next week forget it!
Dave: I was going to use the example of Google there Chris.  They have got a basic research lab – those big companies – there are a couple around that …
Chris: The ones that are cash heavy really..
Dave: The ones that are very cash heavy and they want to get a tax exemption on the R&D side of things.
Chris: God bless ’em.
Henry: I think one thing we are seeing too is so many companies are getting out of the hardware business just to get into systems and software and we’re moving so much of the hardware stuff overseas – out of the United States.
Dave: But is there a lot of innovation happening? I know a lot is still happening in Europe and places like China I don’t hear to many stories about here being huge basic research innovation in China.
Henry: Not that I’m aware of?
Dave: So who is doing it?
Chris: Well I think universities ….
Dave: Someone has to be advancing the state of the art somewhere.  Yeah universities are still doing it of course
Henry: If you look at products of the last ten years, who has been the most innovative?  Apple.  IPads, IPods, they were products that didn’t even exist.  They weren’t just changing the computer.  They came up with products that didn’t exist.
Dave: But are they developing the basic technology behind it or are they more system level integration masters?  1:22:28.8
Henry:Well the idea first is to even think that this is what you want.
Dave: And then how to achieve it.  We want to go to the moon – how do we do it?
Henry:A guy I always respected was Steve Jobs of Apple.  At one time, he had a job at Apple, he was called the corporate visionary and I in my mind laughed at that.   That’s just an excuse to give him an office and pay him.  But you know, if you look in hindsight, he not only changed electronics – IPads, IPhones etc.  He changed marketing – the Apple stores.  He changed animation – Pixar.  He sold it to Disney for 7.5 Billion.  That’s what he did when he wasn’t at Apple.
I’ve been reading a bunch of stuff on this lately … apple is the most successful retailer in the world right now.  The Apple store in NYC grosses more than Tiffany’s jeweler whish is down the street.
Dave: Wow
Henry: They just put a whole new spin on marketing.  He came up with new ideas. Like the old story about the paper clip. A new idea doesn’t have to be complicated necessarily.  It may be but you know it just …
Dave: So have we moved into that area where it has to be product driven research rather than just we’re just going to do a whole bunch of basic research and we have no idea … are those days kind of gone?  Do you have to have an end product idea on mind and application end vision?
Henry: I don’t know but I think in most companies that’s true.  Where there may be some basis research is some government sponsored stuff.
Dave: DARPA?
Henry: Yeah that would be one example,
Dave: Military stuff.
Henry: I don’t know, who knows where the next innovation is going to come from?  Somebody gets an idea and it’s grows.  It’s really an interesting field to be in and see what’s going on here.  Would any of us have predicted what we have here today ten years ago?
Dave: No, nobody predicted the internet for example, nobody predicted mobile phones – back in the day.
Henry: Well, I was at Bell Labs when they developed cellular phones.  AT&T didn’t realize the value of it.  Nobody thought mobile would ever be the primary phone.  A lot of people are getting rid of their landline.
Chris: Oh yeah that’s me.
Henry: The original mobile phone service was just an improvement in mobile phones for those people that needed it or wanted it in a car or something.
Dave: For that niche market they thought it would be a niche market.
Henry:Nobody envisioned it, and phones we got internet connection and everything through it.  The smart phone is a whole new technology. The phone was a phone.  Any maybe a camera on it.  That was it.
Dave: So we need these visionaries who can think 100 years into the future, 50 years or 20 years.  I can see this being a big thing even though you don’t think so.  You think it will be a complete flop but I’m a visionary …
Henry: We got some companies – not necessarily electronics … I’ll give you a good example.  Space X is a good one.  They’re sending commercial space ships up to the International Space Station and who would think they would have come up with schemes to do that. 1:27:08.8
Dave: And they are headed to Mars! Fantastic driver.
Yeah
Henry: If I go back 10 fifteen years ago, would people believe that we have home consumer products running at over 1Ghz frequency?  No way.
Dave: Exactly and that’s not that long ago.
Henry: So if you ask me what’s going to come along in five years I have no idea.  Maybe I might have a little idea in a year or something but five years from now I have no idea.  Somebody will come up with something completely new – people will innovate that’s mankind – in electronics and …
Dave: Are we reaching the upper limit of practical electronics as we know if in terms of high frequency stuff? Are we currently pushing the boundaries.
Henry: That’s a very interesting point something I’ve thought about a lot in that for instance I don’t think you’re going to see frequencies increase much from now on.  Functionality is going to get bigger and bigger.  But you see what’s happening frequencies haven’t increased much in the last 2 years.
Dave: No they haven’t it’s all going parallel processing
Henry: That’s correct, we’ve got more functionality by paralleling multi chip computers things like that.  I think technology will continuously innovate but in different ways.  There for many years we said every year we said the frequency is going to double
Dave: Yeah yeah, that’s right – that stopped ten years ago
Henry: We’ve come to the limit of using standard epoxy glass printed circuit boards.  Above a Ghz that’s a lousy dielectric.
Chris: Yeah so the costs …
Dave: Can you see any change in the way we interconnect circuits and parts?
Henry: Everybody keeps talking about optical.
Dave: Everything going optical?
Henry: Yeah on the board level … I don’t know maybe?
Dave: FR4 is too easy , it’s too practical at the moment solves so may issues whereas  optical seems very difficult.
Chris: It feels like to me that other stuff to is all moving down onto silicon.  So you pushing it all onto multi chip modules, like silicon on module or whatever
hybrid modules.  Or even just all on the same…
Henry: Well larger and larger scale integration is what we’re going to see I think.  Yep well that’s where it’s all been going.  It’s all gone down onto silicon.
Dave: And we’re gonna need more people like you because we are pushing the boundaries even further.
Henry: Well the noise and EMC issues are not going to go away, the regulations are not going to go away.  Somebodies gotta do something about that.
Chris: Yeah.  well I think I’ve read the noise reduction techniques one I think I definitely need to run out and get the newest one.
Henry: It’s almost, as I say 900 pages twice as long as the second editions.  I have a whole chapter there on PCBs, layout and stackout.  Just talking about different combinations of layouts and different ways and the advantages.
Dave: Nice.
Chris: Well we’ve got about roughly 5000 listeners.  So hopefully you’ve sold another 5000 copies with just that chapter.
Henry:Sounds good to me.  I’ll go for that.
Chris: Tell your publisher … it was The Amp Hour!
Henry:We’ll start another printing right now.
Chris: Henry thank you so much for being on the show we really do appreciate it.  Your experience is unbelievable and I can’t wait to read this “third edition” – the newer book I think it’s going to be really great.
Henry: Well ok I enjoyed doing it, I enjoy talking about this stuff.  It’s been almost an hour and a half.  I didn’t realize cause time was flying like that.  Time flies when you are having fun I guess.
Dave: And I’ve enjoyed your New Jersey accent.
Henry:Oh well it’s probably different.
Chris: Just great
Dave: Thank you very much it’s been awesome!
Henry: Ok guys bye.

The post #165 – Transcript – Forced FCC Filtering first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Dave: Welcome to the Amp Hour, I’m Dave Jones from the EEV Blog.
Chris: And I’m Chris Gammell of Chris Gammell’s Analog Life.
Michael: And I’m Michael Ossmann of Great Scott Gadgets.
Dave: Great Scott! What a brilliant name.
Chris: It is a great name.
Dave: Trademarked I see?
Michael: Yeah
Chris: How did you do that one?
Michael: Well I just claimed it as a trademark – I did a search to see that nobody was using Great Scott for anything – or at least Great Scott Gadgets.
Dave: Well yeah I don’t think you’d be able to get Great Scott.
Michael: No it’s too common a phrase.
Dave: Right
It’s a good one.
Dave: I’m jealous.
Chris: He’s going to have to pun it up later, he’ll be thinking of good ones.
Dave: So I’m a huge fan of Back to the Future as a lot of people know.
Michael: Oh I know, of course. That’s why I always have to remind people of if they ask me about it. People who are native English speakers know the name – Great Scott Gadgets that’s a cool name and then when I speak to someone who doesn’t speak it they always say who’s Scott? They don’t know the expression like we do. Even if they speak excellent English they’ll say who is Scott and then I always have to remind the … oh you remember Doc in Back to the Future – how he says Great Scott and they say ohh ok…
[Laughter]
Dave: Somebody actually added up the number of times he says Great Scott in the entire series and I think it was something like 38 times. Some nerd went through and counted them all – as you do.
Chris: 50th time through what else do you have to do really ?
Dave: Well yeah exactly.
Dave: Speaking of which I’m probably going to build up my Lego back to the future after this and shoot a time lapse video of me building my …
Chris: Very nice Dave.. perhaps we should ask Michael about his background and stuff…
Dave: Yeah no sorry.
[Laughter]
Michael: I don’t know I wanna hear more about the Lego Back to the Future kit.
Chris: Alright we’re changing the show format – all Lego all the time!
[Laughter]
Chris: So tell us about your background where did you come from.. what have you worked on in the past?
Michael: So I’m one of these people who came to electronics by way of software.
[Laughter]
Chris: They’re my new favorite that’s my new favorite type of person too for contextual electronics.
Dave: It isn’t like when zombies attack it’s like when software people attack.
Chris: What kind of software though? Are we talking like JavaScript or are we talking C++
Michael: All kinds of stuff. If you’d asked me when I was 8 or 9 years old what I wanted to be when I grew up I probably would have said electrical engineers or an inventor and then I just totally lost sight of that for many years. I used to put together electronics kits when I was a kid but I never got very far. I could tell you how a resistor worked but I couldn’t tell you how a transistor worked. So then I didn’t pick up a soldering iron for 20 years or more.
Dave: Ouch 0:04:53.6
Michael: Cause I was I just got interested in other things. Music, computers and eventually got into IT stuff and worked for a long time as a system administrator and network administrator and did a lot of little software development projects along the way and gradually did more and more security work. Eventually became an information security consultant and through my work in information security I got into wireless communication security and through that I ended up doing some pure research in wireless communication security that led me to software defined radio cause software defined radio is kind of the ultimate tool for hacking on all things wireless and then from there I got into electronics to kind of build my own devices for wireless security research and development. So really that was in the least few years. Four years ago I had never done any surface mount soldering I had never programmed a micro controller I had never designed any kind of a circuit board. It’s all new to me.
Chris: You’re making us look bad here you know.
[Laughter]
Chris: That’s awesome. So when you say wireless security type stuff is that actual people tapping into lines and trying to see what other people are tapping in – is that the idea?
Michael: Partly yeah. Interception, eavesdropping on communications or interfering with communications. Inserting your own messages and spoofing legitimate communications. All of those kinds of things. A lot of people are familiar to some extent with WiFi security and how bad wifi security used to be and how much better it has improved over the years. But there are a lot of wireless communications systems in the world and none of them have gone through as much positive change for security as 802.11 has . It’s an amazingly diverse field and the security elements that they have or lack … it’s a fun field to be in because sometimes you find things that are very sophisticated and sometime you find things that are completely broken and wide open and easy to break. You get a little of both. You get some that are fun and easy to break and you get that are a real challenge.
Dave: I’m using I think WEP2 is it?
Michael: Probably WPA2.
Dave: WPA2 – should I be concerned?
Michael: Well it’s a huge upgrade over WEP which was the mechanism for securing WiFi in the early days and was completely broken ..
Like the why even bother
Dave: Right I’m generally ok but the NSA can still tap in?
Michael: Once it gets onto the wires they probably can.
Dave: Yeah
Michael: Today probably the worst vulnerability for 802.11 systems if you’re using WPA2, probably the worst vulnerability is that there are some weaknesses in the way that a lot of WiFi equipment sets up an initial key for you. So if you use the build in feature for it to generate a seemingly strong pass phrase. It may not be a strong as it appears. But as long as you set up WPA 2 and you choose your own pass phrase and you make it a good one.. it’s pretty solid. 0:09:18.7
Dave: Right. is there anything better than that or do you have to buy some sort of high end commercial product to get better security products ?
Michael: So most of the high end security have far worse security than WPA2.
Dave: Oh right.
Michael: It’s mostly a function of the lack of peer review on a lot of the commercial products. The more proprietary products that is. The ope standards and the more popular open standards and especially WiFi get a lot more scrutiny.
Chris: So it has the one thing that makes me sound like I know what I’m talking about in software, security by obscurity?
Michael: Right. Yes security by obscurity is the norm in the WiFi business.
Chris: Oh ok.
Dave: Does it really matters like if somebody hacks your WiFi they are just going to steal your bandwidth it’s not like they are going to steal your credit card details info and all that.
Michael: Well they could steal your credit card info.
Dave: Hmm? ok
Michael: If somebody is on your WiFi .. is very likely able to gain access to every computer on your network and maintain that access even after they aren’t in range of your WiFi.
Chris: Oh fancy
Michael: Right of course they can install some back door thing that allows them to access your machine from anywhere.
Michael: Yep
Michael: But really you need someone with intent to do that .. most intrusions are gonna come from people who are gonna suck your WiFi bandwidth for an hour or something right.
Michael: Most yeah but it only takes one …and you’re owned forever.
Dave: But once your computer is hooked onto the internet you’re screwed anyway right.
[Laughter]
Dave: WiFi is probably the least of your problems.
Chris: How much of your past experience was like .. were you securing other systems or were you mostly just doing a lot of analysis and trying to break stuff for people?
Michael: Some of both, actually the area where I did the most work initially in my career in information security was in health care. I did a lot of security assessments for different health care organizations around the US. This was in the early days of HIPAA. HIPAA is the regulation of … rather significant piece of legislation that governs how healthcare providers and insurers do a lot of different things. The part of it that is relevant to security is that it HIPAA increased the potential for sharing of patient information between different healthcare entities so as a part of that to kind of cover peoples fears about patient privacy they said well we are making it easier for them to share information about people so we are also going to establish these rules about when it’s appropriate and how they need to protect information so it included a privacy rule and a security rule that introduced a whole bunch of red tape for health care organizations and it forced them to start developing info security programs to protect the patient information that they had. So I was doing a lot of consulting for hospitals and other healthcare providers in the early days of the healthcare HIPAA rules enforcement and helping them figure out where their weak spots were and figure out how to shore up their networks and their procedures and eventually I found my way into a position as an information security officer for a hospital system and from there fell into a role as a wireless security communications researcher for the dept of commerce.
Dave: There you go.
Chris: That seems like a big jump. 0:13:48.5
Michael: It was a big jump. I was very interested in WiFi security and I had published an article or two not any real fundamental research of my own but raising awareness of WiFi security matters. Somebody just called me up out of the blue and said hey we have this research lab in Boulder. We have a whole bunch of people who are RF engineers studying communications systems and we don’t have – we want to look at security and none of our engineers know anything about security so we just wanted an information security generalist who knew something about wireless. So I started there and it was an amazing environment because I was suddenly just doing pure research which I love and I was surrounded by all these amazing smart people. They were all electronics engineers and RF experts and I was the one security guy, the one Linux guy.

Chris: Oh yeah.
Michael: The one .. maybe not the only software guy but my software skills were more advanced than most of the engineers.
Chris: So you were the one eyed man in the land of the blind huh?
Michael: Yeah exactly, so it was a real symbiotic relationship for a long time where people would come to me with interesting problems that I knew how to solve and I was surrounded by people who could help me solve problems that I had never tried to tackle before. So it became very easy for me to learn electronics rapidly because I had half a dozen Phds up and down my hallway that I could chat with any time.
Chris: That’s awesome, like a bootcamp.
Michael: There were a lot of conversations a lot of circuit diagrams and whiteboards and napkins over lunch – it was great.
Dave: So they had seen your articles and publications and called you out of the blue?
Michael: Right yeah.
Dave: That’s another example of – we keep saying this publish stuff!
Michael: Absolutely
Dave: It used to be in the old day sin the journals but these days you can just be on your own website or blog or Youtube and people will come to you if you have the skills.
Michael: Absolutely. I didn’t have anything other than systems stuff on the web.
Dave: There you go, works every time.
Chris: How did you start diving down into the hardware stuff. You had all those great mentors and guys to bounce ideas of what did you start diving down with?
Michael: Well kind of 2 things – one I was surrounded by people at work and the other was that I was getting more active in the information security community and going to more conferences and meeting people who were more involved in hardware hacking and just getting inspired that way. Ultimately I started doing some work, I was investigating a number of different communications systems especially public safety radio systems at work but I was having so much fun with software define radio that doing that kind of stuff that I started picking up projects on the side. One significant one was I became obsessed with Bluetooth and Bluetooth monitoring in particular because there weren’t any tools for Bluetooth monitoring so I started looking into using software defined radio for Bluetooth monitoring and I found this paper that had been written on the subject and I said hey this is a good start to what I wanted to do but I had a few ideas of things that went a little further so … I ended up contacting Dominic Spill one of the authors of that paper who had published code from that project. I started taking his code and updating it and adding new features to try to implement more complete Bluetooth monitoring capability producing software defined radio. We started collaborating, with in a few months at a presentation at a conference together, which was the first time I had met him in person. 0:18:44.0
Chris: Well me and Dave do stuff like that so …
Michael: Yeah really that’s pretty funny.
Dave: Small problem of 20,000kms.
Michael: When I first started contacting Dominic he didn’t answer my emails for a while because he was driving from London to Mongolia.
[Laughter]
Chris: What?
Michael: Finally he was back in London when we started collaborating. Yeah so that project ended up really cool stuff showing people hey it’s possible to discover Bluetooth devices that are non discoverable for example. Everybody thinks if you turn your Bluetooth device to non discoverable mode that other people cant monitor it’s transmissions or find it but we showed that’s absolutely not true and we showed how to use the tools of software defined radio to monitor arbitrary Bluetooth packets over the air and actually derive enough information just by monitoring one channel to figure out what the frequency hopping scheme is, the actual hopping sequence and be able to follow along with it. But ultimately very few people actually reproduced what we did. One of the reasons I think is that the platform we were using is fairly expensive. And we were like buy this $2000 piece of equipment and take a soldering iron to it so that our hack works. 0:20:25.5
[Laughter]
Michael: And then you can do this stuff. Not many people wanted to do that. So I started the Ubertooth project in response to that. We had this relatively conceptual way to monitor Bluetooth communications on one channel and I thought well it cant be that hard to take a more traditional lower cost approach as opposed to the software defined radio approach. It cant be that hard to make a device that monitors just one channel and spits out the bits over a USB interface to a computer. That one project, the Ubertooth project, that is what motivated me to dive into electronics and it was a ridiculously complicated project for somebody to …I barely knew what Ohms law was.
Chris: I wasn’t going to say anything …
[Laughter]
Michael: I had the benefit of being surrounded by all these engineers I had the benefit of getting to know hardware hackers at these security conferences. I was inspired by electronic badges made by people like Joe Grand and Travis Goodspeed and Amanda Wozniak and a whole bunch of people in the information security community who encouraged me and I also had the benefit, we are really in this Golden Age for people who want to get into electronics. 0:22:06.0
Dave: Yeah
Michael: I started out looking at SparkFun and going through the SparkFun..i think it’s called beginning embedded electronics tutorials. So I knew I was going to have some kind of a micro controller. So I looked for – how do I get started with micro controllers? I found this tutorial and I bought an app tiny and put it on a breadboard and got it to blink an LED.
Dave: Woo hoo!!
Michael: Yeah that’s such a huge step..
Chris: It’s all downhill from there guys …
Michael: It was amazing that I had this resource available to me online to walk me through that stuff and I was able to ramp up and take on .. I knew that I wanted to build a Bluetooth sniffer but I knew that I wouldn’t be able to build it right out of the gate so I just sort of set out to find projects that would help me learn along the way and somehow it worked.
Chris: It sounds like your research background helps there too. Researchers are always starting from scratch with that stuff. It’s always – well we don’t know what we are doing yet but we will figure it out eventually. That’s the whole point you are going into discoverable territory.
Michael: Absolutely.
Chris: It’s nice to have markers along the way from SparkFun and everybody else
Michael: Yeah and being able to do both software defined radio and doing hardware were very empowering to me. I came from a software background and I had a pretty good knowledge of communication protocols and how to look at a protocol and guess where the weaknesses might be and figure out what to probe. So I would look at a specification for wireless communication system and I would flip through 100 or so pages… It’s very boring work to analyze. 0:24:18.2
Dave: Gee yeah!
Michael: But I would go through them and I would point at something on p157 and say this message that’s transmitted. This should be authenticated and it’s not and that’s a vulnerability and people would look at me and say – ok that’s great kid. No ones ever going to do that. It’s too difficult for anyone. The off the shelf radios don’t actually support doing the kind of attack that you are proposing and it’s just not practical. Being able to build my own radios either with software or hardware gave me the ability to take theoretical vulnerability and turn them into practical vulnerabilities and demonstrate to people and say here’s what happens when I send unauthenticated control message and your radio dies.
Chris: It sounds like if someone would have cut into this story 2 minutes they would have been debating between someone getting into technology and someone becoming a super villain. ‘They dared me not to do and I did it anyway. I’ll show you all wa ha ha ha ha!’
[Laughter]
Chris: So jury is still out here Michael I gotta say!
Chris: We’ll see by the end of the episode if you are a super villain or not.
Michael: I’m a big believer in using super powers for good.
Dave: How long in the end did it take you to develop the Ubertooth One?
Michael: Well I started out with Ubertooth Zero and I think that stage took me a year and a half but it I didn’t know what it was going to look like at first. At first I thought it was going to be a software defined radio kind of architecture. That’s what my background was a I knew basically how SDR equipment should work and I thought maybe if I could kind rip the guts out of some 2.4 GHz device like the RF front end out of that and rip the back end out of something else, a TV tuner for example and make a Frankenstein device it could be low cost and easy to assemble and it would allow people to do this basic Bluetooth monitoring. Over time it became apparent that I was going to be better off designing this circuit from the ground up which was terrifying but I found these other projects to get me started along the way and I just kept going with them and I had great mentors like the folks at the labs and Gerard Boon of Share Brain Technologies, he’s an open source hardware developer that I met at a hacker camp and we are continuing to do a lot of projects together. I had a lot of people to help me along the way. 0:27:32.9
Michael: Eventually I made Ubertooth Zero which was a USB micro controller and a RF chip, a wireless transceiver IC and an antenna basically and I designed it in Eagle and had a few made and it worked so then I started to make Ubertooth One at that point because all my friends in the hacker community were saying hey that’s great when can I buy one? I was like really I don’t know about that. I decided to try my hand a making something a little more marketable so I designed Ubertooth One which was a little bit smaller a little bit cleaner design, it had a front end amplifier chip on it so it had better RF performance then Ubertooth Zero but otherwise was functionally equivalent to Ubertooth Zero and threw it up on Kickstarter to see what would happen and sure enough enough people wanted it that it actually not only was it worth manufacturing but within a couple of months of delivering my units to Kickstarter backers I had enough additional sales post Kickstarter that I was able to quit my day job.
Dave: Fantastic. It doesn’t take a huge amount – yeah you raised $50,000k $53,000 of your $16000 goal but it’s only 441 backers and it in today’s Global economy and marketplace that’s not many. It doesn’t take many to turn to into a full time business. It’s fantastic.
Michael: I announced the availability or launched the Kickstarter at a conference where I was talking about the project. I already had somewhat of a reputation within the security community which is the primary people who would be interested int this thing. So even though I was new to building electronics I had this niche market that was ready for this and knew me.
Chris: Yeah that helps!
Michael: It helps a lot !! And Great Scott Gadgets was born.
Dave: You’ve been doing that full time ever since?
Michael: Yeah ever since. Great Scott Gadgets was born a year or two before then because I just created a fake company website
Dave: As you do …
Michael: Trying to get some data sheets out of manufacturers and stuff.
Michael: I needed a fake company name and Great Scott Gadgets was the first thing I thought of. And later on people were wanting to buy stuff from me and I was like well yeah I have this company I’ll just pretend it was legit all a long.
Chris: Fake it til you make it man – works every time. 0:30:55.2
Michael: Absolutely.
Dave: So how many Ubertooth One’s did you end up selling?
Michael: I still sell them today. I think I’ve sold a total of around 5000.
Chris and Dave: Wow
Michael: Over the last 2.5 years.
Chris: That’s awesome.
Dave: Geez that’s a lot!
Chris: Where are you manufacturing? How did you get launched into that?
Michael: So I asked a friend of mine – hey you’ve had some electronic conference badges made who did you have manufacture those. I got a referral and I just tried these guys out and Edenet [?]. They are owned by someone who lives in the bay area but their operations are in Shanghai and I had great experiences with them. My first manufacturing went very smoothly, or as smoothly as you could possibly imagine.
Chris: Making us look bad here man…
Michael: One or two minor hiccups but I think I lucked out with a good referral early on. I had such good luck with that I keep using that manufacturer.
Chris: If you find one that is good that is the right thing to do. Referrals are the right way to go in the first place anyways I think because you have other people do the hard work for you of getting through the crap and finding the good ones. Which is fine.
Michael: Right.
Michael: One time I had a rapid project I was making a badge for a conference. It was a ridiculous thing that I put together in 8 weeks including design and manufacturing. I tested 2 or 3 units before it hit the factory. They were coming off the line in the factory and good 30-40% weren’t working. They stopped the line and I think I was in Europe at the time and they are in China and my main contact is in California so …time zone nightmare and it turned out by the time I got on the hone with people they had figured out that my load caps on the crystal were sub optimal and they had fixed the problem and resumed production.
On their own. 0:33:47.2
Dave: Which is good and bad. Sometimes it’s good they have found the problem and fixed it. Other times it’s bad that they … you don’t want them to make changes
Chris: Gimme a call next time .
Michael: That’s right exactly. Well they were trying to get a hold of me. But under the circumstances it was great because it was a very quick turn project and there really wasn’t the time to do anything but that. So I was kind of sold at that point.
Chris: So you’ve done a couple of badges here I see the Toorcon badges on the Great Scott site. Are you a conference junkie are you always at conferences? Seems like a lot of the …I don’t really do many conferences but I’m curious about going around a lot of ’em..
Michael: Yeah I am especially lately, I stayed at home 4 or 5 months last winter and then at this time of year it’s just ridiculous Ive been to 4 different places in the last month. I’m home for a week between 2 trips to Europe – it’s kind of ridiculous. The information security community has a huge number of conferences, just great people and really interesting content and they are my primary market for most of the stuff I’m doing. I continue to do projects not direct related to my products that are worth talking about at these kinds of events. Sometimes they are directly related to my products and I teach a lot of classes. I do software defined radio class. This year I’m teaching it 4 times as a 2 day class I usually do at a conference so it’s a big part of my life for both professionally and fun – it’s where all my friends are.
Dave: We don’t have conferences here in Australia being in the backwater an’ all.
Michael: There is actually at least one information security conference in Melbourne.
Dave: There you go have you been to it?
Michael: I haven’t been yet. But I hope to eventually.
Dave: I think we have lost Chris.
Dave: No I’m back sorry, we had problem.
Dave: Someone hacked in as we …
Chris: My wifi is totally hacked.
Chris: You mentioned your 2 day course that kind of brings us to the main event here which is the HackRF which is the new Kickstarter project which funds today or tomorrow? What is the trigger date?
Dave: 38 hours left.
Michael: yeah by the time you post this episode there will be very little time left so if you are listening and you happen to be listening really soon after this was posted I’d love it if you’d go check out HackRF on Kickstarter and tell all your friends about but if not sorry for the bad timing. It will be available in some form after Kickstarter.
Dave: By the time our next episode comes out you’ll have half a million dollars in the bank?
Michael: Well hopefully – we’ll see.
Dave: That’s what it’s up to it’s up to $529,000
Michael: Oh great – we’ll see how long it takes my bank to release the funds.
Chris: You don’t need to build anything until then.
Dave: Yeah there might be an issue or two there.
Chris: You got how much? 0:37:48.3
Dave: see once again it sounds like a lot of money but it’s only 1700 backers. Right? I got 2300 backers for my little PCB ruler. 1700 is not a huge number. Course the product itself is $275 dollars so you multiply that by ..
Chris: It’s really the percentage of the market that matters there it’s how many people that want this kind of thing that are actually buying it I think that is a big chunk because the SDR is not necessarily new but in terms of accessibility to the public there is definitely a lot of interest in it. I think this is a great entry product into that kind of thing.
Michael: Yeah that was one of the major motivations of the HackRF project in the first place was to provide a very general purpose platform at a lower cost that people could use to get started with software defined radio. I don’t see HackRF being the best tool for any one job but it’s a great tool for a huge variety of jobs and I hope that it introduces more people to software defined radio and broadens the exposure of technology.
Dave: I had a whole bunch of people ask me about this HackRF thing on Twitter and other places and they said – are you going to get one?! Chris and I talked about it last week and well yeah it looks cool. Here in Australia it’s going to be $300 and I’m probably never going to really use it ..It would be a fun toy Id love to be able to experiment with this kind of stuff. For someone like me it’s just another gadget to play around with with the other 2 dozen gadget boards I’ve got sitting in a box.
Michael: It depends a lot on what your potential applications are.
Chris: It was really the software that scared me off too – I always talk about software scares me off. I’m not really into the software side of things and it seems that is what this thing is really good for you say it allows someone you know programming and now you can turn programming into RF signals which is amazing. before you had to go through tons of other stuff to get there. 0:40:35.0
Michael: Right
Chris: Now this is an abstraction layer for RF. That’s the beauty of SDR. It’s unreal.
Michael: It is and that’s what got me excited about SDR in the first place. I was a software guy and I was in a environment where in order to demonstrate some of the things I was theorizing I needed to build radios and I said ‘hey software defined radios – lets me build radios’
Chris: It’s got my expertise in the title!
Michael: Yeah exactly, I was so excited about that but a few years later I found my self turning into hardware guy anyway. But I think part of that was just the immaturity of the field at time. There were SDR platforms several years ago but they were more expensive and the software was less mature. Now we have less expensive more accessible platforms and we have better software frameworks and I think the dream can be more of a reality. If you are a software person you can build radios with SDR without having to learn all that much about hardware and RF.
Dave: At what point is the software at the moment for something like this. Is it good enough that you don’t need to program anything can you do useful stuff without having to cut code.
Michael: You can do some things without code. Spectrum analysis and demodulation of common things like FM radio stations like land mobile radios, public safety radios, digital and audio. Scanner type applications most that are common in the amateur radio community are well supported by software that you can use with an SDR peripheral without having to write code. But I always encourage people to get into the software side of things like GNU radio is the framework that I recommend. I do only open source hardware and software. I’ve been using GNU radio for years. It’s a fabulously powerful software framework for building stuff with SDR and it’s pretty easy to get started with because you can write code for GNU radio in either C or Python so it doesn’t matter.
Dave: I don’t know either! So …yeah there’s the first problem
Michael: Even better then for getting started it includes called GNU radio companion which is a GUI tool for building software. Just kind of drag and drop your signal processing blocks together and drag a line directing the output of one into the input of the other.
Chris: That’s my style.
Michael: Yeah
Michael: It works, it is an incredibly useful tool for getting started, learning software defined radio , GNU radio. Even if you are a c or python developer I recommend this is how you start with GNU radio because after you have build a flow graph in the GUI you click a button and it generates Python for you so you can look at the code it generates and learn to emulate that and use those signal processing blocks in the same way. 0:44:41.3
Chris: Twiddle and hack.
Dave: I think you’ve scared both of us with the term software framework.
[Laughter]
Dave: But then you just won us over with that just click here and it generates the code, yeah thank you very much.
Dave: That’s a great way to dive down into it too. Maybe I should buy one then?
Chris: There you go Dave. He’s selling now to.
Michael: Yeah you should buy a HackRF. or if you don’t think you are ready to jump in head first and spend the money on HackRF or any of the more expensive platforms you could get one of these Realtech TV tuner dongles.
Dave: Everyone’s talking about those.
Michael: Yeah
Dave: Are they any good?
Michael: They are amazing!
Chris: For 20 bucks they are that’s for sure.
Michael: For 20 bucks they are right.
Michael: They have more limited capabilities than HackRF obviously but as a way to get started and just experimenting with SDR it’s so cool that people can do that for 20 bucks.
Dave: You can use the same software tools?
Michael: You can.
Chris: Ive got that on my computer I think it’s SDR # a C# kind of interface program and it’s super simple. The only problem is that I’m in a basement that’s the main thing.
Michael: You know there s a solution for that.
Chris: I know [Laughs]
Dave: A bit of coax out the window.
Michael: Exactly You wouldn’t want to get out of the basement but …
Chris: Cant let the air in.
Michael: SDR sharp is from one of the programs that supports HackRF today and I think everything today that supports HackRF also supports the real tech dongles. They are receive only whereas HackRF can also transmit and they have a more limited operating frequency range but still a pretty impressive operating frequency range and you can explore a lot of spectrum and get familiar with how SDR works for a very low cost.
Dave: This would be an idea platform for those people who want to quite possibly experiment with their car rolling remote controls. If you’ve heard about some illegal hacking of cars. You can sit there and you can record peoples remote controls and then hack in their car.
Michael: Definitely, people have already experimented with those remote key entry systems with HackRF for example.
Dave: Right
Michael: All of those systems I think are vulnerable to some kind of attack. If you take somebodies remote out of range of the receiver and push the button and record the signal that it plays. if you beep the owner of the device back to their receiver, back to their car or garage door you can replay that code and use it once. Even if it is a rolling code with a non repeating.
Dave: Right you can still use it once and really -that’s all you need.
Michael: Yeah like on a garage door for example most of those garage door openers are extremely easy to program with an additional remote so if you get into a garage door once and you bring your own remote along you can just push a button on the thing and get it to honor the codes from your remote and you can get in forever.
Michael: Attacks like that are not as well known as they should be. And of course there are some systems that don’t even use rolling code. Like any time the very old garage doors.
Dave: Like mine yeah.
Michael: A lot of the ones today that are multi user so if you have an apartment complex or gated community that pen for 100 different remotes. That is probably a fixed code that all the remotes are programmed to because implementing rolling codes with a large number of remotes is not very practical so those are things where you can just record a signal and play it back as many times as you want. It’s fun stuff! 0:49:18.8
Chris: What about the hardware on this thing. I’m looking for the schematic for the Jawbreaker, I keep calling HackRF but that’s more the platform side of it.
Michael: HackRF is the brand name. Jawbreaker is the code name of the beta board.
Chris: Oh ok
Dave: Right so what are the primary differences between the beta board and the finished Hackrf which you will actually deliver.
Michael: I don’t actually have a name actually for the finished Hackrf
Chris: Ooh contest??
Michael: It needs something.
Dave: It needs a Back to the Future name.
Michael: That would be good. Maybe Yeah I’m open to suggestions but for now I’m just calling it HackRF. By the time I ship it I will probably need to have some better name for it. It will differ from Jawbreaker a little bit but not a whole lot. Jawbreaker has a built in PCB antenna which was kind of stupid and I just wanted something that people could use out of the box. All they needed was a USB cable they could plug it in and start experimenting with something. Because I was distributing beta boards primarily to people in the information security community who didn’t necessarily have a background in RF and don’t have antenna’s around. That was just a way to facilitate testing. So I’m going to remove the PCB antenna and I’m going to shrink down the whole board by removing a little bit of dead space and some things that were… Like pads that I had for development that didn’t end up getting used. So it will probably be about 2 thirds of the size of Jawbreaker and then I’ll put it in a full enclosure and call it done. The important bits of the circuit design aren’t really going to change.
Dave: Got it. What sort of enclosure are you going to use?
Michael: I don’t know yet. I want it to be a full enclosure…
Chris: All steel.
Michael: All steel?
Chris: Yeah something all steel that’ll not be great for RF right [Laughs]
Michael: Right yeah I’m not sure what it’s going to be. I was putting off that decision until I knew what my manufacturing volume would be. I know I want it to be fully enclosed so I can throw it into my backpack and it wont get paperclips in the circuit.
Dave: At your current volume of 1700 that snot a huge volume – you wouldn’t go injection molding a custom enclosure for it.
Chris: Maybe it’s optional.
Michael: You might I don’t know I already have one product with an injection molded case that I’m only manufacturing in quantities of 1000 at a time.
Chris: Yeah it’s only 1700 too at the beginning not 1700 forever.
Dave: Well it’s China right we’re talking about China.
Michael: Right
Dave: If I was involved I would lay out the board to fit an existing off the shelf case then you can machine holes in. Then you can order it directly from the manufacturer.. You know all the mounting holes are in place and you …
Michael: Right
Chris: Beige cases..
Michael: That’s definitely an option.
Dave: I like to play it safe like that I just like having being able to buy the case off the shelf and going ok I can drill the holes manually but in volume production they’ll drill them for me and all that jazz.
Michael: I’m a big fan of the Sick of Beige cases too.
Dave: Right ok
Michael: Regardless of what kind of enclosure I have for the final product it will support a Sick of Beige style enclosure. So if people are building their own HackRF project they will be able to .. even if I have a custom machine or injection molded case they will be able to have some kind of enclosure that they can get made affordably.
Dave: I kind of liked this sick of beige fad when it first came out but now it’s like I want to start something else .. sick of clear acrylic plastic with no sides campaign.
[Laughter]
Dave: I think it’s been heavily overused.
Michael: I can see the point of view. It’s a great option to be able to support though for people who are building their own boards just because it is so easy to get those things manufactured. A friend of mine had 3 dozen of them or something like that on his friends laser cutter. We handed them out to everyone who wanted one at Defcon. It’s really great to be able to have that very accessible small unit manufacturing.
Dave: Brilliant. Shall we get on to our questions? 0:54:32.6
Chris: Yeah I was going to say the questions are probably a good idea. I had a question add on to one of the questions that was in here . Of course I need to find it now.
Dave: Oh ask yours first , cause you get priority ….
Chris: So the person here asked about the zinc chip which we have talked about it’s been popping up. Just if you had any opinions on that and I was wondering your design decisions behind the LPC is your main processor and then you have a Inaudible ? part I saw on there.
Michael: Yeah it’s just a CPLD.
Dave: And what is the CPLD doing?
Michael: Simply interface glue between the analog to digital converters and digital to analog converters and micro controller.
Dave: Oh so it’s not any heavy duty parallel processing.
Michael: No it is not giving any digital signal processing.
Dave: Glue logic.
Michael: In fact it may be possible to remove the CPLD from the next design.
Over speaking 0:55:38.2
Michael: Well there’s a pretty cool feature on this LPC 40300 micro controller that we are using where it’s called SGPIO serial GPIO peripheral. Basically a highly configurable external interface that can support various parallel or serial modes. We are using a parallel mode with external clocking. That’s a pretty rare interface to have on a micro controller. Something that can be a parallel interface that can handle 8 bits 20 million times per second 43 million times per second with external clocking. The only reason we put the CPLD in originally was because the ACDAC chip uses a DDR interface and…
Chris: Oh
Michael: Interfacing the DDR SGPIO peripheral looked tricky so we got the CPLD in because we knew we could do it that way.
Chris: It’s configurable so you can always fix it later.
Michael: Yeah it looks like we could do without but we might keep it anyway just because it’s fun to have that configurability there.
Dave: You don’t want to go rocking the boat, you know your platform works so you wouldn’t want to go changing it for this HackRF thing ..
Michael: Yeah it’s not as critical or as a difficult a test as changing the RF path but it’s still
Dave: It’s a risk.
Michael: I don’t want to delay manufacturing because I made some stupid design change that I didn’t need to and it didn’t work
Dave: Yeah just because it would be cool to get rid of one part
Michael: Right
Michael: I think relating to your question your original question was about Zinc processor. So we aren’t using anything like that on HackRF which is a little unusual that we don’t have any kind of FPGA on board we just have this tiny CPLD that doesn’t really have any digital signal processing capability and then we have this LPC40300 micro controller. It was our intent.. this decision was primarily made by me and Gerard Boon who I mentioned earlier who is really had a huge role on this project. We decided that we wanted to have the lowest cost solution that would let us get samples in and out of high speed USB at the maximum rate.
Dave: Oh ok
Michael:We didn’t really care if we had digital signal processing on board because the DSP capability in every bodies laptop is so impressive theses days. Now there are benefits to having DSP on board so we are having fun with the fact that we did end up with the solution to have some kind of capability but that wasn’t the main goal there. The core M4 …inaudible LPC40300 is a cortex M4 which is kind of the top of the line cortex M series with DSP instructions and it has a floating point unit and it’s running at 200 MHz and it has a cortex M0 coprocessor so…. 0:59:23.8
Dave: So it’s pretty beefy yeah.
Michael: Yeah it’s not a very micro micro controller and it has this built in high speed USB interface that we have been able to run at the very maximum theoretical speed so it’s been great and we haven’t really missed having an FPGA on board and Gerard put together this really cool think the HackRF porter pack which is a prototype at this point. It’s like an add on board that plugs into the Jawbreaker and it has color LCD screen and a couple of directional buttons and an audio codek with headphone and microphone jack. he just wrote some code that does wide band spectrum analysis sand plugged in a USB battery pack and is just running the HackRF with this work pack in stand alone mode just as a handheld spectrum analyzers
Dave: Nice yeah yeah.
Michael:Across 6ghz of bandwidth .. well not 6 at once 20MHz at once. He was able to get that running at 1000 FFTs per second so ..
Dave: Wow Nice
Michael: I’m not usually running FFTs that fast on my host computer so I was pretty excited that he was able to do that and it kind of showcases that we do have some DSP capability even though it wasn’t our original intent.
Dave: Any plans to have that as an official add on?
Michael: It’s definitely something that we are going to keep working on Gerard may be working on manufacturing a small number of them just for the people who have the Jawbreakers and then he’s definitely going to update the design for the final HackRF board and we’ll make it available for anyone who has HackRF down the road.
Dave: I’ve got a question from OJazz1 will there be a different way to power the board? He cant imagine it being abel to transmit any significant distance sourcing power from just the USB port.
Michael: That is a good observation.  We don’t really want people transmitting any considerable distance from the USB.
Dave: Is that your problem though ?
Michael: Yeah the FTC is a thing and so we’re pushing the limits of USB 2.0 bus power and this was another one of our major design goals for HackRF. Our big goals were no 1 open source hardware, no 2 very wide operating frequency range, no 3 transmit and receive, no 4 portability and being able to just plug this thing in on USB and all you need is a laptop and USB cable and antenna and you can take it with you anywhere you go. This was a key goal for me and part of that is that it doesn’t give us that much left over power say for a front end amplifier for transmit. We do have a 10db or so of amplification that you can switch on at the front end but that doesn’t get you into any kind of power that’s going to go further than 10s of meters for most applications. So it’s something that you can use HackRF to experiment on your bench or across the room but if you want to actually transmit signals any great distance you’re going to have to have external amplification and if you do that you should also add external filtering and you should know something about what you are doing. 1:03:49.8
Chris: Yeah get a ham license and everything else.
Michael: Yeah exactly so that’s my answer for anybody who wants more transmit power. You’re on your own but there are many options out there. We have a 50 ohm center port and you can plug whatever you want into the front of it. I just caution you to take care and be a good neighbor on the spectrum and follow your country’s laws and all of that.
Dave: Boo hiss!!
Chris: Well that’s kind of what Gregg did, Gregg Charvat one of the former guests. I went with him to Hamvention. He ended u buying this old super heavy bad ass receiver and he ended up pairing it with a transmitter separately because it was only a receiver. You know actually pairing up equipment like that you can do the same thing here where you just have a transmitter you hook it in and your ready to go using that as your front end.
Michael: Right that was a pretty cool hack.
Chris: Yeah I liked that stuff. I had a question on a personal selfish basis. Did I hear you are using KiCad for all your stuff now? Hows that going?
Michael: I am yeah I adopted it for Ubertooth One originally , I did Ubertooth Zero in Eagle because I was using the SparkFun tutorials and that’s what they were using and what everyone else seemed to be using and then I started working on Ubertooth One and it quickly became apparent that I needed to make it a 4 layer circuit board and my first thought was lets see how much it costs to upgrade Eagle and I said well it’s not that expensive but this is an open source project, I want anybody to be able to take this design and do whatever they want with it. Open source is most important goal for me and my business and so I decided that I should look around for any alternatives because I didn’t want people to have to pay for a license for some software to modify my open source design. So I found KiCad and I started working with it. I thought it was great, it has it’s quirks.
Chris: Yeah totally
Michael: As do most tools but Ive gotten used to those quirks and I think it’s a pretty exciting project that’s progressed a lot since I started using it. I’m using it now for absolutely everything including some pretty complicated projects including HackRF and my Daisho project which is a multi person board project that involves FPGAs and USB 3.0 and all kinds of crazy stuff. We are pushing KiCad to it’s limits in some ways.
Dave: What’s it called Daisho?
Michael: D-A-I-S-H-O. his is a project primarily for monitoring and security research into high speed wired communication system so the idea is it’s a main board that has FPGA and some RAM and USB 3.0 backend to a host computer and then a pluggable front end boards that each implement some target communication medium so we are targeting high speed media like USB 3.0, gigabit ethernet, HDMI and we put on the front end boards connecters and transceivers like the Phi chips for the target technology. We put a pair of each on so a signal will come into a connecter into a transceiver go over to an FPGA on the main board in digital form then go back out the other transceiver and connecter and it’s a man in the middle type of architecture. 1:07:59.3
Dave: Oh yeah right
Michael: It lets us do monitoring or injection or modification on the fly on these very high speed wired communication systems. Yeah so it’s pretty exciting for multiple reasons. One is that we haven’t had tools for some of these high speed communication technologies. The only thing I can think of that is a similar architecture is Bunnie’s NETV.
Chris: Oh yeah where he injected the messages on top of the HDMI signals.
Michael: So we’re doing a very similar architecture to that except supporting higher rate signals like the NETV only supports up to 1080I HDMI and so we are going to support 1080P and beyond and we’re going support a whole bunch of other different protocols and were throwing RAM on the board that makes it capable of doing fun stuff and we’re also putting on this backend USB 3.0 which is one of the most exciting parts of the project there are basically only 2 USB 3.0 chips that you can buy in small quantity today and one of them is a pretty high cost micro controller with USB 3.0 from Cyprus and the other is a bare 3.0 transceiver from TI and so we’re just using the very simple transceiver and plugging it into the FPGA and developing an open source USB 3.0 core running on the FPGA.
Dave: Ooooh nice
Chris: That’s gonna make a lot of companies angry I bet. Small ones happy, big ones mad.
Michael: Anybody who wants to develop a low cost open source USB 3.0 device would find this quite cool. This work is being done primarily by Marshall Hecht who is a contractor working for me. He has already completed all the USB 2.0 functions and is currently working on USB 3.0 and it’s a little bit slow going but he has made great progress and it’s pretty exciting.
Dave: What’s the plan for this another crowd funded project?
Michael: I don’t know? I suspect that Daisho may be less marketable than HackRF but I’m not sure. This project still has aways to go and exactly what the applications are … our main goal is to get the platform working an support inline monitoring of a handful of different communication media. That has some pretty good uses especially in the information security community. But I’m not quite sure how marketable it’s going to be because it will be a more expensive platform than the stuff I’m working on.
Dave: Well the good thing about the crowd funded platform is you put it out there and if you meet the target then nothing happens
Michael: That’s true, that’s true. That’s one of my favorite things about doing crowd funding is that it is built in market research.
Chris: Did I see on your Kickstarter profile that you had one that was not successful.
Michael: Yeah I had one that was not funded a little over a year ago. I think of that project as being a great Kickstarter success because I learned that that device was not marketable the way I thought it was. I learned that at very little costs. I didn’t make a 1000 of them.
Dave: Can you tell us what that project was? 1:12:21.0
Michael: It’s called the firefly cap and it’s just a hobby electronics product, which is a little different for me to have something that was pure hobby electronics . It’s a lid – do you have Mason jars in Australia? They are like home canning jars of jelly jars that have a 2 part lid and a seal..
Dave: No …
Dave: Oh right yeah …
Michael: It has a disc and then a threaded ring that holds the disc on to the glass jar. These are super common in the US and everybody has some of these jars in their cupboard. So what I did was I made a circular circuit board. Made to replace that disc and it has contacts on it to which you can solder an array of LEDS and it’s a jar of fireflies which of course lots of people in the hobby micro controller world have built their own jars of fire flies which is how this project started. What was unique about his project was that I had it powered by a photo voltaic panel and a super capacitors with an energy harvesting circuit that would work in indoor lighting conditions.
Dave: Ahhhh
Michael: So you guys know that is a major challenge. So for me as a designer for my own personal project that was what was fun about it – making it work indoor. Under moderate indoor lighting conditions it would wake up as soon as it got dark after charging all day and put on a light sow for a little while might only have been 10 minutes but it would simulate fireflies for a while. If it happened to get a lot of sun light if it was put in a window it would put on a show for much longer like an hour …So that was a big challenge and it made the thing more expensive that it would have been. What I learned from putting it on Kickstarter was when people see this thing they immediately think of a 5 dollar garden light and they think why does this thing cost 30 dollars – it’s stupid. I don’t want to pay for this and he’s never going to reach his funding goal…and so it was extremely educational for me and Kickstarter did what I needed to do which was it showed me that while this project was great fun for me personally it wasn’t marketable in the way I thought it was.
Chris: Customers are still a thing huh?
Michael: Yeah – go figure.
Chris: Just like the FCC yeah. Still a thing.
Michael: That was a really cool project and it might be something I revive someday but it’s never going to have the mass appeal that I thought it might. I set my funding goal higher than I needed to in part because I wasn’t 100% convinced that that’s where I wanted to take my company. I wanted to make something high volume for a larger market as opposed to focusing on a real niche product and more on my own community ….. the information security community. So it was kind of like well if there’s enough interest to make it worth taking on and supporting all these first time micro controller hobbyists, then maybe I’ll manufacture the thing. So I set the goal kind of artificially high and that to some extent bit me too cause people would see the high number and say….
Dave: It’s a psychological thing yeah
Michael: He’s never going to meet that goal …I wont bother
Chris: Psychological stuff .. barriers [?]
Dave: That’s a mistake a lot of people make they think that to be successful they have to go into high volume consumer stuff yet some of the most successful people out there are the niche players. For example, yeah it may not make you filthy rich , it may not make you Apple rich but you can make a damn good living from almost any niche product.
Chris: I think the Pebble guys are filthy rich…
Dave: Well maybe.. no I wouldn’t say they are filthy rich they got their $10 million but I’m sure they spent a lot of that actually manufacturing a proper polished consumer product.
Michael: That is such a huge responsibility.
Dave: Yeah
Chris: Plus it’s nice that you target people that re using SDR type stuff at least have a very deep interest in it. You have a certain type of person you are targeting so you probably get a lot of benefit from people that contribute to the repositories and feedback bugs and everything instead of just asking for a lot of support, they’ll go figure it out themselves. 1:18:08.9
Michael: Oh huge benefit and that’s been a part of the way I run Great Scott Gadgets from day one is I do everything in the open source way. All the things that people commonly do to execute and support open source software projects I do with my open source hardware projects I use open repositories and I use wikis and I have support channels like email lists and IRC channels and I’ve really had the benefit of getting a lot of my own users involved in the project and contributing to the projects. Now I have half a dozen contractors working for me and they are pretty much all people who volunteered to help with my projects and then down the road I was able to say hey hey hey I have some funding for … how’d you like to do more of this stuff and get paid for it? That’s my only recruitment method really. Taking volunteers who I know do good work and who I know are interested in this stuff and funding ways to give back to them the way that they are giving back to my projects. I cant do that for everybody but I try to it where I can specifically in the form of contract work for them to them to do specific development tasks on various projects.
Chris: So I have another selfish question. I was just learning Github. Whats the deal with that and hardware because I’m kind of learning about that as I go and I mean is it does it fit well, is there stuff that it’s good at and not good at. We’ve been talking about it on the show in the past and just revision control in general with hardware.
Michael: I’ve pretty much migrated all my projects to Github. I like Github and the main reason is I really like Git. Git is an outstanding tool and Github is a convenient place to use that tool. Almost all of my projects have multiple facets there’s a hardware design and there’s some firmware and then there’s some software on a host computer that talks to that firmware. So I have multiple parts, some of which are hardware and some of which are software that all need to be consistent with each other and track version numbers together and so forth. I have a lot of volunteers or contractors who are helping out with my projects so it’s essential to have some way to collaborate. I find Git to be an excellent tool for hardware and for software as long as your design software for the hardware side uses a text base file format which KiCad does of course. I get more collaboration on software than I do on hardware typically but it’s very common to have in my loose knit team, 2 or 3 people working on a hardware design together, where only one person is making substantial changes and the others are acting as sounding board or doing design review or helping with architecture decisions like how about you use this chip here. We very much take the approach of one person is the designer and other people are there to help that designer. Git and other revision control systems aren’t too well suited for software like KiCad. Or it’s the other way around KiCad isn’t too well suited for suited..
Chris: Concurrent design..
Michael: Right in terms of concurrent design. we’ve done a little branching and merging with our KiCad designs but it’s dangerous waters.
Chris: Yeah! I didn’t put that part there – who put this part here!?
Michael: Mostly certain changes work really well like if you go through update all of the manufacture and part number information in for all the 10k resistors in a design without actually changing the layout. That kind of a change works extremely well in a revision control system. But actual changes to the layout and circuitry are things that we haven’t done much of in a multi user or multi designer mode.
Chris: A script I saw over the weekend where this guy Robert on Twitter, he creates Gerbers from the dynamically generates them and then overlays them so you can see the where the parts have changed. It’s like a visual dif…
Michael: Oh cool. Like in real time or close to it?
Chris: Yeah
Michael: Yeah that’s cool it’s like a continuous integration concept.
Chris: It still seems really difficult but he wrote it for himself. Again getting it to a wider audience would be tough but it’s really cool.
Michael: Yeah I think that’s great use of the technology. That’s the kind of thing Id like to do more of and Id like to do more of automated testing. When you are making hardware design changes you cant really , you are limited as to how fast your testing cycle can be. It’s definitely worth pushing that limit and it’s also worth doing automated testing for things like firmware changes but it’s hard and you have to have some kind of set up where you have the attached hardware and you have programming system and some kind of automated tool to take whatever’s been committed to the rep and automatically compile it and install it and run some kind of test procedure. It’s a lot harder when it comes to hardware and firmware than when it comes to a pure software project. That kind of continuous integration and testing has become the norm in many areas for software development. It’s an incredibly valuable tool especially when you are trying to promote a collaboration with multiple people. if some body breaks something you want to find that out right away instead of finding out a month later after everybody else has forced that code. So finding ways to do that more with hardware and firmware is something Im very interested in pursuing down the road.
Chris: You software guys are messing up hardware in all kind of good ways.
[Laughter]
Michael: We’re only going to get so far with it …
Chris: Yeah soldering is still a thing … very much so.
Dave: It’s my favorite programming language.
Michael: That’s right.
Chris: Yeah it’s gonna fix a lot of stuff still … 1:26:06.7
Dave: Do we have any last minute Reddit questions? There is a technical one from Supercoup.
Dave: How fast will the HackRF be able to retune and set the oscillator to jump between frequencies?
Michael: Oh yeah that’s a good technical question.
Dave: Do you have a technical answer?
Michael: Yeah I can say a few things about that. One is that for a lot of frequency hopping systems you don’t actually have to retune in hardware because HackRF can operate simultaneously across 20 MHz of continuous bandwidth so if you in the 900 MHz ISM band in the US there are a lot of proprietary frequency hopping systems that hop through a set of channels that all the channels together fit within 20 MHz. So to implement that you don’t have to retune the hardware at all you just retune in software. It’s instantaneous but there are some applications where you might want to retune in hardware and Bluetooth comes to mind for example because Bluetooth operates over 79MHz of bandwidth and we don’t have that much on HackRF so if you wanted to hop along with the blue tooth network you would have to retune in between packets. In the case of blue tooth you have little over 200 microseconds in between. That’s your minimum time in between packets. I haven’t seen a lot of frequency hopping systems that really push that to a lower number than about 200 microseconds usually. With HackRF we haven’t really optimized the tuning and receive transmit time yet but when we do I expect to get that time under about 100 microseconds based on the parts we have. We have multiple stages that we could accomplish that tuning. if it turns out that one stage isn’t going to be as fast as I think it’s going to be then we can always just use a different stage. So I’m pretty confident that we will be able to hit that 100 microsecond ball park, however, this is the big gotcha. That’s the tuning time after the command is issued by the micro controller. If you want to control frequency hopping from the host computer you also had an USB frequency and that’s going to likely push you way over 100 microseconds and potentially be a problem for any frequency hopping implementation. So if you want to do a frequency hopping implementation that is wider than 20 MHz of all the channels then you’ll probably need to implement your frequency hopping in the micro controller which fortunately is pretty easy because it’s an arm micro controller and it has a built in boot loader and if you have any experience in software development it’s a pretty accessible platform. if you have done any C code on any architecture it’s not too big a leap to learn how to write C for an arm and getting it compiled and installed. That’s one of the nice things about having a general purpose micro controller as opposed to an FPGA it makes that kind of development more accessible. 1:30:09.3
Chris: Did you have to learn FPGAs as well? Is it another one of your skills?
Michael: Yeah I’m not great with FPGAs that’s one of the skills that I have sought out from people who work for me. I know enough to be dangerous and it’s something that I’m working on getting better at. I haven’t had to do too much yet because we went with an FPGA list design for HackRF. My first real project with an FPGA is Daisho and I have other people doing those parts of the project. I haven’t been forced into becoming as much of an expert in FPGA development as I probably should be.
Chris: Once it’s in the world the buck stops with you so you’ll be learning about it at 1-2 in the morning before it goes to the manufacturing. Yeah, You’ll be fine…
Chris: Mike I’m very impressed. 4 years really? Like I said at the beginning of the show you’re making us all look bad here.
Michael: Honestly a huge part of why Ive been able to do what I’ve done in a relatively short amount of time is online resources like the Amp hour, like SparkFun tutorials like so many of the things that have been made available by guests that you have had on the show and all of the people in the open source hardware community and that is really why I am so dedicated to open source. Even going back into my IT days absolutely everything I can think of that I’ve ever done in my entire career that I was proud of – I did with something that was open source. So I feel very strongly that I want to give back tot that community and that feeling has only increased as I have gotten into hardware because the rapid development of the open source hardware community over the last decade is really what has enabled me to take this stuff on.
Chris: Does that mean you’re gonna be there in Boston this coming week?
Michael: Unfortunately no. I just have a terrible travel schedule right now. For some reason everybody wants their conference to be in September and October. I really want to go this year and last year and both times had to make the hard choice not to.
Chris: Maybe next year. Maybe when Dave finally comes over.
Dave: Right
Chris: Finally.
Michael: I’ll make you a deal Dave if you go I’ll go.
Dave: Right ok.
Chris: That’s easy out. I think instead we just start having conferences in January February time .. there’s a bunch of conferences in Australia. Oh sorry dear I have to fly to this warm location while you are freezing in Cleveland.
Dave: That’s it just move everything here not a problem.
Chris: No Dave just start a conference that’s what I’m trying to say.
Dave: Oh right.
Chris: 3 person conference me you and Michael.
Michael: I’m there.
Dave: Thank you very much Michael Ossmann. Even your last name I just realized is Ossmann. Open source software man.
Michael: I didn’t even recognize that until someone asked me in all seriousness if I changed my name to Ossmann for that reason. I was like oh wow I never thought of that!
Dave: Oh boy. next thing you know we will be having peoples kids named open or something … yeah
Chris: After famous astro physicist
Dave: Satan’s an awesome name thank you very much I get much praise for that.
Chris: So Michael where can people find you on the net is Github sites or wheres the best place to start.
Michael: Probably the best place to start is www.greatscottgadgets.com that has links to my blog and Github for various projects. I’m @michaelossmann on Twitter but that means you have to know how to spell Ossmann.
Dave: Double S double N.
Dave: Double S double N that’s good alright well thanks again man. Enjoy your $500,000 that’s about to hit your bank account.
Dave: Now you have to produce them.
Michael: Thanks. That’s the thing I see the number go up and I think that’s a big obligation
Dave: There’s about 35 hours left folks as we recording this.
Dave: Probably about 14 when this hits press.
Michael: Thank you guys so much for having me I’ve been listening to the show for a 100 episodes or so..
Chris: We’re sorry [Laughs]
Michael: It’s one of my favorites and it’s a pleasure to be here.
Chris: Thanks for coming on. Alright we will see you at the next conference hopefully but until then we will be looking at all your awesome projects.
Michael: Alright
Dave: See ya mate.
Chris: See ya.
Michael: See you then 1:35:50.2

The post #161 – Transcript – Gifted Grimgribber Grokker first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Dave: Hi, welcome to the Amp Hour. I’m Dave Jones from the of EEVBlog.
Chris: I’m Chris Gammell of Chris Gammell’s Analogue Life.
Eric: Hi everybody, I am Eric Ries, author of the Lean Startup.
Dave: Welcome Eric it’s great to have you here.
Eric: It’s great to be on, thank you for having me.
Dave: And for those who don’t know it’s a book?
[Laughter]
Chris: The Lean Startup.
Dave: Well you now ….I don’t know what is it a website? Is it a blog, is it a video? I don’t know … I mean there’s so many mediums these days.
Eric: What we actually do is we take this thing called ink and we smear it onto dead tress and we pack it in huge boxes basically and mail it to people.
Dave: Wow
Chris: This is the future I think.
Dave: Absolutely
Chris: It’s going somewhere.
Eric: It’s like an heirloom crafted vintage object is the way I think about it.
Dave: The future is here and we are seeing it.
Chris: And also people can see it online. You type it into Google you also get the leanstartup.com. You get all the – you guys have a conference now right? That’s another thing you guys are doing?
Eric: Thank you for all these plugs, yeah we do do a conference, Dec 9 in San Francisco.
Chris: That’s exciting.
Eric: It’s become something of a movement much to my surprise … people getting passionate about these ideas.
Dave: Who’s we?
Eric: Well so there’s a lot of people who have joined this grassroots thing. I obviously run the company that puts on the conferences and I work a little bit as a consultant but there’s no like shadowy corporation behind it. It’s pretty much what you see online. There’s a bunch of bloggers. There’s a bunch of links to people on my site that I kind of consider kindred spirits like Steve Blank and Ash Maurya, Patrick Vlaskovits and Brant Cooper.  I’m sure I’m leaving people out as you guys have me on the spot but …
Eric: You know, I actually think that far more important than the individual personalities involved are the fact that there’s a lot of entrepreneurs who have taken this idea seriously and formed their own meet up groups, in a couple hundred cities now. 0:02:31.2
Dave: Wow
Eric: They are the ones acting as the laboratory, pushing the cutting edge of this. More than I just as a talking head.
Dave: Well I think there is you know 2 or 3 here in sydney of that meetup.com thing.  There’s 2 or 3 internet entrepreneurial business start up groups. They seem to be starting up all the time.
Eric: One of the first most surreal experiences of my life was .. boy 3 or 4 years ago, I spent exactly one day in Sydney. 0:03:04.1
Dave: Right [Laughs]
Dave: What you flew all the way here? You flew 15 hours to get here and spent a day?
Eric: No luckily I was in New Zealand and I got this request from the lean startup meet up group in Sydney Australia on my way home from New Zealand so I thought well sure why not? So we did an event in a pub in Sydney. I would have told you I knew not a soul in Sydney in my life mate I don’t know anybody in Sydney. I have met a few since then and there’s like a packed house, all these people in the pub to hear me talk and I give my presentation. Every time I give a presentation I try to change it up a little bit and make it a little bit different, cause you can see the videos online, I try not to make it too boring.
Dave: Of course
Eric: But I kid you not first question number one from the audience was how come you didn’t do that bit about such and such topic?
[Laughter]
Eric: They watched the video they knew what to expect and they were actually disappointed that there was a certain point I hadn’t made and actually I sought that guy out as I was so disturbed. Whats going on? And he said listen I’ve seen your videos, there was no book at that time, I’ve read your blog, and he had actually brought his development team from this company to this event because he wanted them to learn about that specific topic and I hadn’t bothered to mention it. He had a really good reason to ask the question, it was one of the early indication that there was something going on here with Lean Startup.
Dave: Here’s my business card I do consulting you know? I’ll come to your company.
Eric: Oh god it’s a long flight.
Chris: Uh oh. Dave do you hear that?
Dave: Yeah I heard it.
Chris: That was weird.
Dave: Buzzing sound I have no idea what that was. I think we had a dodgy switch there folks in our Samsung mike – hardware issues.
Eric: This why I loves software so much – this kind of stuff never happens. 0:05:05.3
Dave: Never happens? [laughs]
Eric: Yes, unless there’s cosmic rays that flip a bit back by random chance.
Dave: Yeah exactly, you can get flaky hardware that you are developing software on – it happens.
Eric: If anything ever goes wrong it’s always the hardware’s fault that’s one of the things I have learned as a software engineer – early in my career.
Dave: Right.
Chris: That’s it – it’s over guys we are done here …
[Laughter]

Chris: Well tell us a bit about your background a little bit just for people that haven’t read the book yet. I mean everyone definitely should be reading the book.
Eric: Oh thank you.
Chris: Where did you come from? And how did you get to this point?
Eric: Listen no one’s more surprised than I am about how this has all turned out. I’m one of those kids that was programming computers in their parents basement from a young age. So you know you can picture me like all the other nerds. Spending way too much time on the computer and not enough time with other people, and to my parents credit they were worried about it but they were kinda willing to let it go and kind of see what happened. I really thought, you know that I would be programming computers my whole life. Something that I really loved. I found out you could get paid to write software which was like one of the greatest things to happen to me in my life.
[Laughter]
Eric: Really, it was an incredible and very unexpected experience and I was like this is it, this perfect… this is all I ever have to do. And so I did a lot of freelance programming as a kid and did like internships and just like anytime someone would pay me for programming I was all there. I eventually realized that in the early days of the internet you could get paid to write books about writing software because there was a desperate short supply of programmers who could write – or who would even want to. So as a kid I did that and then when I was in college the dot-com boom was in full effect and everyone said if you want to do software you should become an entrepreneur and start companies. It just seemed like everybody was doing it so I thought alright let’s give it a try and by the way that’s not a very good reason to start company.
Dave: Well it was in the dot-com era
Chris: That’s right it was
[Laughter]
Eric: It seemed like a good idea but actually I do not recommend it.
Chris: In the dot-com era it seemed like if you had indigestion and it seemed like a good idea people said yeah here’s a couple of million.
Eric: So I did classic dot-com failure from my dorm room at school. If you have seen the Social Network, I like to say I had the first half of the social network movie experience. So all the the parts about working really hard and getting my friends to join the company… We did all the stuff just like they did in the movie but we didn’t have the second half where anybody wanted our product. No one got rich, dot-com bubble burst and in the movie and any movie that has an entrepreneurial protagonist, there’s all the people that told you – you know you were wrong to start the company and that you shouldn’t do it and it’s a bad idea etc. In the movie the most satisfying part is you go back to those people and say ha ha now I’m a big success, you should have whatever – wrong. So in real life, the most embarrassing thing to, you can possibly imagine is you have to go back to those people and say yeah you know you were right. It didn’t work out.
Chris: Yeah .. Could you have just avoided it at that point? Is that like a thing?
Eric: Maybe I should have just changed my name and gotten a new identity and moved to a different place but it didn’t occur to me. I didn’t have that international man of mystery skill at that time.
Dave: You have to tell us what was this startup? 0:08:45.4
Eric: Ok listen – see if this sounds like a good idea to you ok?
Dave: It might work these days! Who knows?
Eric: Ok I kid you not I’m not making this up here goes…Picture us in 1999 we had an idea that college students from top universities starting in the Ivy League should create online profiles on the web for the purpose of sharing…
Dave: No. Who is gonna want to do that?
[Laughter]
Eric: That sounds like a pretty good idea, if I do say so myself! But unfortunately, and this is so classic of the dot-com era to me, we were very focussed on building a real business, everyone was saying we don’t want to be just like Yahoo, you know we want to be a real business. And so we wanted to use that technology for online profile sharing to the purpose of getting jobs. So it was a resume database the profiles were called resumes, so you would put up your little resume and companies could pay for access to the resume and help you find a job.
Eric: Even if you had a time machine and went back and told my idiotic 20 year old self, dude theres going to be this thing called facebook it’s gonna be huge, you have the technology ready to go you are in the perfect location. You should do it! I would have said in my very arrogant way at that age – you’re an idiot.  I’m trying to make a real business here not just kids sharing …I had no idea what it meant to make a business. Which is what happens when you start a company because you heard it is a cool thing to do rather than for any good reason. 0:10:20.1
Chris: Uh huh
Dave: Yeah
Eric: So we went down in flames.
Dave: So are you saying that sometimes if you go into it too seriously, that can be your downfall? Thinking oh I’m going to start a business, rather than I’ve got this cool product and I’m going to do it and if it turns into a business fine but if not meh.
Eric: Well right but people forget. It’s hard to explain this to someone that hasn’t been through it but you think that you create a company in order to make money but that’s just wrong. A company that is succeeding in it’s mission will make money as a sideline. You need to breathe oxygen and take in food in order to stay alive but we don’t just live to carry out those metabolic processes. Hopefully we seek out some higher purpose. And starting a company is like that, you have to have an instinct to make the world a better place in some specific way – what we call a vision. I think that is very important and you have to be willing to change your strategy in order to achieve that vision if your original idea turns out to be wrong. I had a no concept of that in my earlier companies. I was just like you built a business plan and if the business plan is good things go well like it says in the plan you get rich somehow.. But I didn’t have any real understanding of why you do this in the first place. What do you have to believe in to sustain you through the difficult times when inevitably things in the plan don’t work out like they are supposed.
Eric: Skipping way ahead of course a lot of my work now is about helping people understand that distinction between the vision that you try and keep as immutable as you can and the specific strategy which is subject to changes. You get a learning from what really works in the market. We call that change a pivot – a change in strategy without a change in vision. That’s something I did not understand at that time. I wish I did.
Chris: It seems like a lot of places still don’t understand that, I’m thinking like businesses playing competition. It seems like there is so much focus on how are we going to do this thing? Well the thing doesn’t matter. You’re building another Instagram or you’re building this little sensor board? Whatever, you know no big deal. So whats the plan though? That’s the important part.
Eric: Can you make some predictions for me about whats gonna happen in the future?
Chris: [Laughs] Yeah, soothsayers as it were.
Eric: Sometimes I like to think of what we are doing at Lean Startup is trying to move away from business astrology towards business science.
Chris: I like that
Dave: Right
Eric: The people that do start ups get really offended when I claim that they believe in astrology, cause a lot of them are engineers or scientists and have a technical background and they don’t like to think of themselves as astrologists. They take that quite offensive but if you ask most startup people, really anybody doing product development, how’s it going? You know what the answer is?
Chris: Going great, going great!
Eric: Always going great.
Eric: How do you know? How do you know it’s going great? Well let me tell you…
Chris: I’m not fired yet. [Laughs]
Eric: Last month we shipped this awesome product, we did this great campaign.. whatever something happened in the past and now we are killing it. Our numbers are all up into the right. And you are like, OK well I have an alternate theory. Last month mercury was in retrograde and I heard that every time mercury is in retrograde numbers go up and to the right. So that’s my theory and if you ever try that they get so angry with you. How could suggest such a thing? I’m like listen, neither of us knows why numbers go up and to the right but I’m just visiting – you live here. You actually believe this stuff.
Chris: Show me some data!
Eric: Where is the evidence that what you are doing is causing the thing you are celebrating. If you read the tech press, read the launch announcements of startups, they are full of vanity metrics. You know the company has 30 billion messages sent and it’s launching today and it’s really exciting and you are like whoa what does that really mean? Is that 30 billion customers ?
Dave: The alternative term for this of course is bullshit.
Eric: Yeah
Dave: Come on you used a buzzword there, you should have used bullshit.
Dave: Sorry that’s just one of my favorite terms.
Eric: I’ll leave the professional judgements to you guys. 0:14:31.8
Chris: Yeah so Dave is nothing if not professional.
Dave: Vanity stuff goodness sake…
Eric: It’s in the book though.. And there’s the other side of that is ….. there’s a whole other thing about the accounting.
Eric: Oh innovation accounting – yeah that’s the one .
Eric: Yeah as you can see I’m a bit of a buzzword factory but ….
Chris: That’s how ideas are kind of spread right?
Eric: Well yeah listen I’m not apologetic about it at all. In order to talk about things in an intelligible way you have to have terminology that people can agree on.
Chris: Yeah I agree.
Eric: It just has to go through the buzzword phase because…Buzzword is an intermediate stage between no one knows what it is to being universally accepted truth.
Chris: Kaizen – eughh. I know the Japanese have all these words for all the lean stuff but man, Kaizen always just rubs me up the wrong way for some reason, you know it’s just…
Eric: Let me just put it this way. Words and phrases don’t ever achieve that escape velocity to become universally accepted or very vulnerable for this very reason, because they take cultural significance that is not related to the initial thing, but has to do with the fact that a certain group uses that term and then it becomes a thing.
Eric: Anyway, the fact that it has entered the universal business lexicon I take as a victory for this trying to help people understand this concept which is obvious in retrospect, I can’t believe we ever thought we could talk intelligently about startups without the ability to talk about this thing that happens to every start up along the way, where they have this total failure that gives them a key learning and then allows them to make a vital success. And so yeah, I do believe that part of the problems we have with start ups has to do with the way we do accounting and people are always disappointed when they hear me talk and I’m like hey we are going to talk about accounting. I thought we were going to talk about something cool like startups, like who wants to talk about accounting? But so many of our problems in new product development in innovation really are rooted in accounting and so we have to make changes to ways we account for progress otherwise we are going to keep having those problems over and over.
Chris: So I was wondering about the lean side of things, based on your background, where did you get introduced to lean because obviously I have stated my displeasure for Kaizen I understand the benefits of it, some of the lean stuff kind of ….
Eric: I do understand. So it’s funny because, those who don’t know lean comes from lean manufacturing which was a distillation of the Toyota production system. Just in time production as you say Kaizen, Andon cord, Kanban all this Japanese terminology coming of Toyota, really starting after WW2 but becoming very popular in the united States in the 80s and 90s. And it’s funny, I actually have no background in manufacturing whatsoever, I have never set foot in an actual factory in my entire life.
[Laughter]
Chris: Ohhh that’s gotta change. That’s awesome
Eric: Listen I’m a software guy through and through, you know mechanical things was no forte of mine I could never even get a red port to do anything but catch on fire.
Dave: That’s a start
Eric: That’s step one. So what interesting is by the time .. so I talked about the failed start up .. early 2000s I moved out to silicon valley and started doing start ups out here and had a bunch more failure. But then finally had a chance to do things differently.
Eric: I’d always been an advocate for agile software development and I was a big extreme programming fan. I had this instinct that if we worked faster, if we had customers more involved, if we kind of did things in quicker sprints with more automated testing, less documentation, that kind of stuff. That was kind of my intuition and I was always the kid on the team agitating for those thing where other people would be like no we’re going to do things the traditional way kid. By agitating enough we could kind of reach some kind of compromise. So like we would do it a little bit more agile, instead of doing an annual release we would do a release every 9 months or something and we would call that a victory.
Eric: When I finally got the chance at a company called Inview to set the technology direction from the very beginning as the CTO I was like no we’re going to do things as close to real time as possible. And so, we developed this set of practices that today has a lot of terminology associated with it but at the time we didn’t even know what to call it, we were just doing it. Take something called continuous deployment, where as we write software we put it directly in to production as soon as the automated tests certify it, without having any kind of manual interventions. So we were able to release production every 10 minutes, 50 times a day on average.
Dave: Wow
Eric: Really fast.. And we could do that without causing problems because we had the infrastructure to do that. So if you study manufacturing you will be familiar with single piece flow and the Andon cord you pull when there a defect on the manufacturing line to stop the line and immediately intervene.
Eric: So without knowing it we were doing something really similar in software. As soon as you would write a module of code, we would immediately deploy it to production in single piece flow. Because that makes debugging so much easier if theres a problem. You know instantly what caused it, namely the thing you just deployed, rather than when you deploy in large batches, imagine god forbid a monthly release or annual release. You take 10000 different features an deploy them at the same time now theres a problem how do you know which feature is the problem?
Eric: That works great in software because when you are building something new, something like 80% of the work of that newness is in underlying systems and infrastructure, it’s not even user visible. So we make for every one user visible change, we make 1000s of supposedly side effect free infrastructure changes. My claim is ok so if they are supposedly side effect free lets just deploy them now – you said there were side effect free. Then people are like whoa wait up I’m scared, help me mommy! 0:20:25.3
Eric: I’m scared of it because I am worried that maybe there is a side effect. There’s no ghost in the machine either there is or their isn’t a side effect. There’s no spooky action in the disc [?]  Either the systems are tightly coupled or they’re not. So let’s find out immediately. Then the flip side of it is every time we have a surprise, like if there is a side effect and we have to roll back – lets immediately invest and prevent that from every happening again through automated testing and suddenly we call the cluster immune system which allows us to automatically certify each release is good. I give you that background because at the time, you gotta go back this is 2004-05, I’m using these techniques to great effect, I mean our team at Inview was incredibly productive because we had a better development methodology than most people who we were competing against. Everyone always wanted to know why we were so productive. The general presumption here in silicone valley is if something that is good is happening then whoever is in charge of it must be some kind of super genius.
Dave: Right
Eric: Which couldn’t be more wrong. It’s almost rarely the cause maybe even never the cause I don’t know. So I had this reputation as some kind of technical super genius and yet what I would try to explain to people why we were getting these results, no one understood what I was talking about. I would talk to them about continuous deployment and investors who would wanted to invest in our company, employees I would try to hire…. I had people working for me who were 10 year veterans of some enterprise software company. On their first day of employment I would say listen you are going to deploy to production today your first change. Right now you and me we’re going to fix a bug at your desk in the next hour.
Dave: And they wet their pants!
Eric: That’s exactly right! It was really scary for some of them, their first reaction was always the same. They’d be like listen kid – this isn’t how it is done and they would explain to you how software is made. I had to be listen with all due respect Sir …try it you’ll like it.
Chris: Sir I’m paying.
Dave: Sir Im paying you.
Eric: I’d want to be respectful but you do work for me and listen the deal that I would offer all you have to do is try it. If you try it my way and you don’t like it and you think it doesn’t make sense then..
Dave: Leave!
Eric: I said convince me that we are doing something wrong, if there is a better way I’m all ears. I called it the green eggs and ham defense – try it and you will like it and you know everybody liked it pretty much. It was so self evidently true that this was a more productive way .. I mean using it, no one ever goes back. But, just being able to show people that something works is never enough because like think about we would raise money VCs. VC would ask their tech due diligence guy to take a look and make sure that the company was on sound footing right? Can you see where this is going?
Dave: Oh yeah..
Eric: Tech due diligence guy is a 20 year veteran … gray haired veteran with a software history ..
Dave: At IBM!
Eric: And I’m doing it all wrong! Listen kid this isn’t how it’s done and I’d be like listen with all due respect let me show you the evidence that this works. If you ever met any 20 year veterans of any industry, the last thing they are interested in is evidence that the way they have worked their whole career is not the best way. Nobody wants that.
Chris: Yeah my field is littered with – analogue engineering is just like nothing but gray hairs and just most of the time I love that patronizing, let me know you actually how to do that but sometimes it doesn’t work like that.
Eric: Yeah and listen and I don’t mean to say we never learned anything from anyone who was experienced… far be it. Many of our best engineers in that team who advanced the system quite a bit were, were quite a bit older than I was but the problem was for the people who were viewing it from the outside, it was my job to explain to them what worked and why it worked and to be honest I didn’t know why it worked .
[Laughter]
Eric: The theory of traditional engineering theory and this goes back to pre lean manufacturing, back to the logic of mass production, says this kind of small batch development with rapid feedback it shouldn’t work. The overheads should dwarf the benefits, but that turns out to be wrong. So I was studying anything I could get my hands on that would help me figure out what the hell was going on.
Eric: It really bothered me that I was doing something I couldn’t explain and therefore I couldn’t answer people’s questions about it as I started to be ….Remember I had this reputation for being a super genius so all these companies are asking me for advise, like I’m on all these advisory boards and people are asking me what to do and listen here’s how we did it in Inview and at blah blah blah. People would get really angry like I was saying something really insane, like that will never work! I’m not telling you a theory I’m just telling you a story it literally works for me come visit and I’ll show you.
Chris: You should have cut out the wa ha ha ha at the end of very story
Eric: Right that’s how the super genius becomes the super villain.
Chris: Exactly
Eric: Right that is what was happening to me. The first thing that I read that really helped explain on the product development side what was working for me were books on lean manufacturing book. Like oh here is a theory that has a straightforward application of what I’m talking about, that helps understand the logic of batch size, the importance of feedback, the quality benefits of going faster etc. And so that was a big relief to me. So then I would start talking to people who asked me … well Istarted talking to them about Kaizen and all this Japanese crap and you can imagine that wasn’t so great either cause there were a bunch of people saying listen I want to learn about software why are you talking to me about manufacturing ? 0:26:11.3
Chris: Yeah
Eric: And to be fair, there is an important conceptual difference and this really gets to the heart of what lean start up is really about. Lean manufacturing and in fact all our previous business management systems from the 20th century, I mean going back to Six Sigma and Scientific Management and Alfred Sloan and General Motors … the things we teach to our MBAS. Those systems are really designed around known problems, so if you know in advance what the customer wants they can help you give the customer what what they want more efficiently and in order to do that they use all these tools of planning and forecasting.
Eric: So the reason we have all these business plan competitions and people are obsessed with business plans…. It’s not because they love astrology, it’s because in the old system we could make pretty good forecasts of what was supposed to happen because the world was a lot more stable than it is today. The likelihood was if you are in business, you are building something that’s a new version of something you have done before. So version 95 of an old, old product of an automobile or pick your favorite product category, has a lot more certainty than uncertainty in it and the uncertainty tends to be technical uncertainty about a new technology or some new feature.
Eric: The insight behind Lean Startup was to say listen in a start up situation, what our defining characteristic is uncertainty. We don’t know what is going to work, we don’t know the customer is going to. The customer doesn’t read the business plan so they don’t do what we think they are going to do. Our job is to act like scientists and discover what is going to work and that means planning and forecasting is out because we don’t know what is going to work in the future, but it also means that we can use all these lean techniques like pull and batch size etc but we have to apply them to a new standard of value. Not just what the customer wants because that’s something we don’t know. We have to apply those same techniques to our hypothesis about what’s going to work.
Eric: So this is really a system of rapid experimentation to discover what works and that framework unlocked a lot of explanatory power for me. It allowed me to make sense of a lot of things that I had been doing in my own careers that worked. As as other people started to latch onto what I called the Lean Startup, I started to write about it. We started to take it into other industries, people started asking questions like ok sure it works for consumer software but what about enterprise software, what about clean tech, health care; what about energy, what about hardware … you know at first my thought was I don’t know if it’s going to work in these other domains, I mean logically it seems like it should but I don’t know . Luckily since the book came out 2 years ago, a lot of people said ok I accept your challenge that I didn’t even know I had issued. Lets go find out if you are right. I believe this is a general purpose management system to be used in situations of high uncertainty and so far so good as we have tried to apply it more and more strange and strange domains
Dave: Can it be applied to the one man band. To just the sole software or hardware developer in their garage – the midnight engineer? 0:29:30.0
Eric: I think it is even more important in that situation. When you are doing a job for somebody else and listen as much as we glamourize the individual entrepreneur the companies that you are familiar with there’s a lot of employees involved. It might have been Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs alone in their garage for a little while but pretty soon theres employees ok. Like way, way before the auto pod theres a lot of people working and to be fair even most entrepreneurs who take outside money… you’re fundamentally working with other people’s money in a lot of entrepreneurial situations. So if it fails, you know sure you’re upset, but you didn’t bear the loss directly, it’s someone else’s money and you got a resume. You got a good benefits out of it you got paid, you got a resume line you built useful skills, all these good things happened to you as an employee. If you’re a solo entrepreneur, if you really are a one man band, it’s your life were talking about. The ultimate finite resource so to me their greatest crime is to spend all this time and energy working on something and then nobody wants it. And so you basically wind up saying well that was a total waste – I wish I’d found out about this a little bit sooner.
Dave: Well not always because the one man band, often their reason for doing it is because they want to do it. It’s their hobby, it’s their passion. Even if it fails, it doesn’t sell, it doesn’t matter to them.
Eric: Well lets distinguish doesn’t sell from doesn’t have any impact because I think it’s the rare person. I mean listen occasionally I do meet a true artist who is like a real [?] who believes in art for arts sake. But you never hear about these people because they don’t care if anybody hears about them, they are happy to just do their art in their basement and they’re done. So they don’t even need to distribute it. The vast majority of artists and inventors and scientists, like the vast majority, want to change the world, through their work in some way. Not always in a commercial way and that’s not important to me but they want to have an impact. As soon as you say that they are like well if you want to have an impact it’s gonna involve other people so the question is will other people do the thing you expect them to do or not? And a surprising number of times the answer is no. Others[?] are stupid and irrational and you know… poor and they lack your vision and they refuse to use your thing and it’s so classic. If you look at … if you don’t want to look at commercial failures then go on Source Forge and add up the total number of man hours that have been invested in open source projects that have never had anybody download them.
Chris: Yeah
Eric: That’s a huge waste of time and listen I have plenty of those projects myself so I’m no better than anybody else at this. A lot of those projects are a very sad outcome, where you say gosh it would have been better if they had had actual customers in mind earlier and more involved in the process. They could have avoided this situation where they built something that nobody used.
Dave: Often you don’t know what people want to use until you build it. You have to have a finished product – bang here it is – and theres so many examples of that.
Eric: So here’s my claim – this is very controversial not everybody agrees but my claim is that for any product there are ways to test if people are going to want it before the final finished product is done.
Dave: In theory of course there are yeah.
Eric: We call it the minimum viable product or MVP. The version of the product necessary to get that initial testing and insight into the market. The reason it’s such an important concept, I could prove to you it is a necessary step if you believe in something called the technology life cycle adoption curve. So people are familiar with crossing the chasm?
Chris: Is that like the hype curve or is that something different?
Eric: It is different although I think it is related. The idea is that as technologies or any new product diffuse into a population, early adopters try it before mainstream customers. So there is certain products and those of us who live a little bit more on the cutting edge know this extremely well. There’s certain products you can tell your parents about, they are ready for prime time and they can just go buy them in a store and set them up by themselves. And there are certain products where you gotta tinker with the settings and you gotta know how to download them it and you it’s not ready for mainstream consumption.
Dave: 3D printers
Eric: 3D printers fit squarely in that category of early adopters only. Entrepreneurs of course are rarely satisfied by early adopters they have visions of building a product that everyone will want to use. Whereas there is actually really good research says it is impossible for a product to be used by mainstream customers first. It has to go through the early adopter phase and I can prove it to you, it’s a very simple proof.
Dave: I don’t think you have to prove that to anyone here.
Eric: If everyone on this podcast considers this self evident then we are way ahead of a lot of the audiences I talk to, let me say.
Dave: Well our audience is smarter than your average bear they are hardware people you know. You go in there and try and tell your corporate suits you know they just don’t get it whereas us, ehhh??? Us hardware people get it.
Eric: You should hear what the corporate suits say about you guys.
Dave: We don’t care because we are smarter than they are.
Eric: Amen I couldn’t agree more, you guys are definitely the smartest and best looking podcast and audience I have ever seen.
Dave: There you go
Chris: yeah
Eric: So if you believe what I’m saying that you have to work with early adopters before you work with the mainstream, then everything I’m talking about follows logically from that because you say alright, if you do extra work to make a product more polished more ready for the mainstream before you give it to an early adopter, all that extra work is waste.
Dave: Oh totally
Eric: Because it doesn’t help you to the mainstream and the early adopters don’t care. That’s why early adopters are awesome, because they don’t need to have all the polished guard rails and they are happy to go onto the advanced settings and muck around. In fact if you don’t have the advanced settings there – they get kinda pissed! It’s counter productive to make things too slick too polished before you show them to early adopters, therefore one way to think about minimum viable products is to say what is the least amount of work we must do to get that initial engagement from those first customers in.
Chris: Well we’re all about the least amount of work around here that’s for sure.
Eric: One thing I know about engineers hardware or software is that they are lazy. 0:35:56.7
Chris: Yes, definitely.
Eric: And I think that’s one of our great virtues as Larry Wall said.
Chris: Speaking of hardware let’s get into that a little bit because I think that’s one of the places where I start to have issues with lean stuff or lean start up is kind of defining the MVP for a piece of hardware because, theres always the ambiguity between, is Arduino with a breadboard attached is that MVP like how do you actually define that for a hardware situation?
Eric: So the first thing that’s critical to understand about MVP, is it’s industry and situation specific, so it’s not important that your MVP is fast as like a software guys MVP. Obviously we are building something in hardware you know, well Iwon’t say obviously because I know some pretty slow software guys and some pretty fast hardware guys. Often, the MVP for a piece of hardware is longer than for a piece of software but that’s irrelevant it’s not an important comparison. The question is, who is learning fastest in your market, your segment, you want to be the fastest learner to the extent that if your competitors are doing anything you absorb what they are doing faster than they can absorb what you are doing.
Eric: So if you think about that, often times there is a way to prototype the experience for the customer without having the full bells and whistles. So I’ll give you an example from a car company I was working with, where they have an idea for a new in-dash entertainment system to replace what you would normally get in your car you know navigation, entertainment podcast kind of stuff. So the traditional way to change that would be to do a massive research development project integrated into the supply chain and for the model year 5 years from now l[?] and we said OK let’s do something a little different.
Eric: Let’s, use the MVP, it’s always the MVP in this experience, we want to see customers using this in actual car, to see if the experience we are creating for them is actually better than the old experience as measured by their lived experience. I think I’m using the word experience too much but by whats actually happening in the car versus some focus group or some more abstract thing. So you kind of see where this is going. We mocked up an alternative plastic housing [?]took a couple of days and put an Android tablet in it.
Dave: A tablet in a … yep. I was going to say that it’s obvious!
Eric: Yeah we wired up an Arduino board so that it could get access to the cars internal electronics and next thing you know we got some volunteers, you know early adopter types who were like, oh yeah you wanna much around with my cars electronics sign me up no problem. These guys were overwhelmed with the initial early adopter response. They initially only… they literally put one ad on Craigslist to say – it didn’t even say which company it was. It was just like – we are thinking about messing around with your electronics for a new auto product. Are you interested? Please fill out our survey – and hundreds of people, hundreds decided to try something new. If you think about people who like have a long commute every day, the in-car entertainment is so important to them and like an innovation you’re awesome.
Eric: So from the customer’s point of view, they take their car into the shop and visually it looks like the in-car navigation screen has been replaced, but actually whats happened is we’ve slotted in an Android tablet in front and it integrates…so it is very plugy [?] on the backend… It’s totally non scalable, absolutely no supply chain behind it. It’s manually done one car at a time. This company went from concept to having customers in 30 days instead of 5 years. And then this is the second part about MVP, the phrase MVP causes come confusion because it just sounds like it’s all product but really what we are trying to do is start the build, measure, learn cycle of learning. So if you just do one MVP and launch it, that’s like doing one science experiment. You can never tell if that goes wrong, you don’t really know if the experiment was flawed or the hypothesis was flawed. Right it could be either.
Chris & Dave: Yeah
Eric: So you have to keep going with a series of experiments with a first version of this that they put in people’s cars that people actually didn’t like very much and didn’t use nearly as much as they thought and turned out that certain features were a lot more important than others. I’ll make something up, this is not actually their thesis because I don’t want to give away, I want to respect their confidentiality. So you go we don’t need radio controls cause no one listens to the radio we’ll just cast instead and podcasts care better than radio and lo and behold like… Not everybody actually feels that way. So whatever your thesis is you have to go in there and discover…..
Dave: Sorry Chris! 0:40:54.0
Eric: Sometimes you want to listen to a sports game live and then you are like where’s my fricken radio?
Dave: See to me that’s self evident, that is so bleedingly obvious! I would call you a dumbarse if you thought otherwise.  [?] Inaudible 0:41:10.4
Yeah, to not put a radio in it …
Eric: This is what’s so great – I actually just made that example up because I can’t tell you what really happened because I want to respect this companies confidentiality but..
Dave: Cool
Eric: In almost every case when Ive been involved with a company that’s done this at least one of the things they viewed as completely obvious turn out to be 100% wrong.
Chris: Mmmmn
Eric: The problem is you never know in advance which of your ten obvious truths is that fatal flaw that you just missed. And I think this is the only way to find out.
Chris: And then you always have someone fighting tooth and nail for it right? You have someone saying – in this case no it has to have a radio it has to have a radio and if you tested and it did say you didn’t need it or you did need it that kind of thing is – it get into all the ego of people designing …
Eric: Oh totally
Dave: But you have to be careful though, because when you take a feature out and you don’t give it to them to begin with …. right, you take that radio feature out and you don’t give it to them they might go oh where’s the radio? Oh ok, it hasn’t got one I guess that that’s ok, you know and you can get a false sense of success there – if you understand what I mean.
Eric: Yeah, this is when it goes to experimental design so in this particular case these guys did something really clever which was the initial customers … I don’t remember the exact details but something like, the customer who had agreed to have this thing installed in their car for a week and then at the end we are going to take it out of your car. So what happened is at the end of the week we would come to you and say listen … we were paying people to beta test so you get your usability $100 gift certificate or whatever your prize was. But they would say at the end of the week, you know if you would rather us not take it out of your car, if you want to keep it you can and forgo your $100 gift certificate and keep it in your car for another 30 days. So it was a way of gauging if people were just like, cause people might say, oh yeah sure it sounds fine give me my gift certificate.
Dave: Yeah
Eric: And they had some people who were not that interested, anybody willing to have the product removed from their car is not really an early adopter or the product is not really as good as we thought. Some customers were like, this thing had one killer feature in it – that was so good that certain customers would say yeah I’ll give up my radio for that. Yeah I’m annoyed that it doesn’t have a radio but I can’t live anymore without this feature, it’s so critical to me. And that was the kind of validation that they were looking for.
Eric: Let me point to another thing that’s really important cause you said something that was key which is, some people are sometimes nervous that if you are missing a key feature and you piss people off in MVP then that’s bad. But actually, it’s actually a good thing. If you have a couple of customers who you put a thing in there and it has no radio and they are like what are you a moron? There’s no radio! Then first of all you can say I’m sorry, take it out of their car and thank them for your time. You got really valuable learning that this thing turns out to be actually really important. You immediately go remember – build, measure learn. You immediately go to the next version that does have a radio and now we’re better of than we were. 0:44:29.5
Dave: Of course yeah
Eric: So it’s always better, even if you are missing a critical feature and you are convinced it is critical, you’re still better off running the experiment till that customers verify that in fact something that is important to them versus insisting that it has to have every last thing that everyone on the team thinks is critically important before you launch it to anybody.
Dave: But if it costs you not much in terms of time or money to put that feature in you’re probably better off going with your gut saying hey, I like the radio so I’m gonna put it in. So then you can avoid that build measure…
Eric: Listen we always want you have to believe in your hypothesis, if you can’t learn anything, so this is an old lesson in the scientific method, you can’t run an experiment unless the person running the experiment believes that it’s true. Because otherwise, you wont be surprised when it doesn’t work. So yeah if you really are convinced that it has to have radio then amen, that’s what it has to have.
Eric: What the danger is, especially in a team situation, if you have 5 people working on a product, they will have 5 different ideas about what is essential. What we don’t want to do is say well everybody has to get their pet thing in before we can even run them on experiment. It’s better thinking we’ll just add features one at a time and we will experiment, one experiment at a time and hopefully that way learn which of these five features is critically important and which one isn’t.
Dave: Sure
Chris: So with regard to the adding stuff in, one of the things with hardware it seems like a limitation is kind of the discrete nature. I think of PCBs right and trying to roll a new component or even a new big chunk of a circuit. In that case, it seems like it has to have these discrete steps – I’m going to do this, I’m going to do that… How do you actually decide when to make that jump because that seems like another big issue with iterating.
Eric: There’s a couple of different ways. The first is, as you guys know depending on the thing we are talking about there is often … most technology platforms there’s a high technology count and a low production count version of the product. Think about the [?] ..rays inaudible versus burns silicon. But also I’ve worked in some industrial applications where….I’ll give you a funny example from an appliance company that makes appliances where you have to do injection moulded plastic.
Eric: You’ve to build out the tool to produce millions of the unit. But because it is appliance sand appliances are regulated in order to prove that you pass the energy star standard and various other regulatory requirements, you have to boost a prototype version much earlier in the process than the one you can mass produce. You can do that using soft tools, so you have spent a lot less money for soft tools that burn out a lot sooner but nonetheless allow you to produce a pretty reasonable quality products. A consumer will look at it and say that looks like a real appliance, it works completely functional, it passes your regulatory.
Eric: So I was with a company that does this and they were trying to build a high end appliance, not a mass produced one. The high end appliance market at the very high end it’s not that big. The number of people in any given year that can afford the most expensive appliances is relatively small so we’re talking about 1000s upon millions. Yet their internal company rules required them to build out the hard tools as part of their normal product development process so they are going to spend a year building up the tooling for something where ..
Eric: So I was talking to them and I said listen, you think of it this is a very uncertain proposition that customers are even going to want this incredibly fancy thing. So I said alright how about if we could sell one appliance, how long would that take? And they were like what do you mean? Listen you don’t understand manufacturing. Producing one is the same as producing a million, once you have the line set up you can produce as many as you want. I was like oh no no no I’m sorry, my mistake. I don’t mean one line of appliances. I mean what if I was to sell one individual appliance? They laughed at me and they were like well we have one in our office right now. I was like what you’ve already built this appliance? And like sure we had to, it’s in our office we use it everyday. I said ok, could you sell that appliance? They’re like well you know our company has a [?] store where we allow people to come and see our latest products. So I was like oh really is that really far away or something? They were like no it’s in the main building that we work in. So it was literally 100 meters from where this demo unit is.  I was like could you go back to your office and get a dolly and walk this unit 100m to the other place and put a price tag on it. See if anyone wants to buy it. They were like you cant do that! And I was like why not?! Well our product development process says blah blah blah…. And they had every dumb bogus reason. Listen software guy you don’t understand hardware. Listen you actually already have the tooling necessary to produce more of this thing, that you already built, than you probably will sell in your first year. You’d be lucky to sell that many in your first year.  So you’ve talked yourself into this complicated situation when we could be doing the validation right now.
Eric: And what’s awesome was that’s a business where new appliances, like really new models, tended to come out every 5-7 years because it took a long time to design. The industry structure was set up for slow iteration. So we worked through a plan where they could be on an annual release cycle with the suppliants. Software annual releases have gone the way of the Dodo, like we don’t do Windows 95 anymore. We don’t put the year the thing came out and the name of the product. 0:50:18.2
Dave: Some companies still do.
Eric: And you know something’s gone horribly wrong cause it’s at best once a year – no good. So, in hardware, in this particular hardware situation, annual releases are gonna kick the pants out of their competitors so it’s a really good situation to be in. And now here’s my favorite part. Any time you are selling a product that has a long cycle time for the sales process, cause it’s not like people buy an appliance on a whim. At this price point it’s like part of the design installation, it’s complicated. You can actually can do 2 build, measure, learn loops working on the actual product iteration, the soft tooling , celebrating the development of the actual thing. But you could also be iterating in the sales cycle with the product concept.
Chris: Through 3d images and stuff like that do you mean?
Dave: Selling the product that doesn’t exist yet.
Eric: Exactly right! Every customer buys a product based on your vision of what it’s supposed to be. Which is the easiest thing to get right en route. I was working with a diagnostic company that makes an extremely high tech health diagnostics physical device. I mean the science of this thing blew my mind. It’s incredibly complicated has patents up the wazoo and is something that is very difficult to sell because it’s an expensive fragile ..
Chris: Yeah regulatory …
Eric: But on the other hand the benefits of this thing …customers what they can do with this device is evil. But once they can find out what it can do they are like holy shit I’ve gotta have this. So, the problem was that this is not yet an approved device and for sale. So we cant sell it yet but regardless of the sales regulatory issues, is an even bigger problem which is that it is unclear what the workflow would be for this device . The version of it I saw working in a lab and it’s a very complicated workflow and it needs to get a lot easier before they will be able to boost sell it at the rate they want. But how much easier does it have to get is an unknown. So you can see where this is going…
Eric: So ok … 0:52:40.4 inaudible [?] Start printing plastic manufacture and why don’t we do a complete to scale replica of what we think the workflow is supposed to be. So imagine, it’s like printing all the external shell component of all the parts of the device. This device had a lot of components to it. So they are like well that we can do right now. We have a proposed schema of what we think the final design is supposed to be. So we actually built in very little time a replica lab that looks like it has this technology installed in it, that has the workflow set up as model example and then we could bring customers into this lab. And the customer we’d say listen sit down try the workflow see how it works here’s the specification document, here’s all the details here’s the pricing … all the things you would need to know to make an informed decision about whether you might want to purchase this or not. We asked them to make a purchase decision and all the flows are mocked up so there’s a man behind the curtain …no matter what you do with the shell you see the same images on the screen. It’s a demo, the customer doesn’t know that it doesn’t work, it looks like it works.
Eric: So what’s cool about it is, every time you bring a customer in you can change the experiment you can operate it at a different price point you can change the configuration to make the workflow easier or harder. The big question for this thing was should it have robotic arms that do a bunch of things for you, or could we have humans do it themselves? As you can imagine adds a lot of cost and complexity to the device and that has to be fully automated for something that is mostly automated. So those meant huge differences to the amount of engineering complexity required.
Eric: So by figuring out whether customers actually would pay a price premium for that automation or not … We’re able to do a much better job of setting up the specification that we have the engineers working on. And in almost every case where I’ve done this .. I’ve done this in gas turbine engines, healthcare products like we are talking about, equipment that’s used in fracking, really heavy industrial hardware stuff as well as obviously more consumer electronics products. The way we get the MVP to get to market a lot faster, is by making the specification document easier, by reducing the requirements.
Dave: Of course
Eric: When we are sitting at the whiteboard with some product manager and a bunch of scientists and we are imagining what we think a customer requires in order to buy the product. We tend to get a little carried away with the technical standards.
[Laughter]
Dave: No ….
Eric: The efficiency has to be off the charts… I’ll tell you a company I was working with, here’s how they chose the efficiency ….a requirements document. I hate the word requirements by the way. Nothing is required at this stage except the laws of physics, everything else is a hypothesis.
Eric: So they showed me this requirements document and it had this efficiency target. I said where is this efficiency target coming from? They said well that’s what is going to be required to win in the market. I said how do you know? Well, we took all of our competitors efficiencies and what they are today …we projected 5 years into the future when this product is scheduled to come out, for what we think the competitors best efficiency using their best technology blah blah blah will be and then we added on 10% for good margin. To make sure we are the most efficient. So we extrapolated a thinking we don’t have any clue about, based on information we don’t have, and then we added 10% just for the cherry on top. I’m like ok how much of the fact that this thing is gonna take 5 years to produce, is in the fact that you set this ambitious efficiency target? 0:56:13.5
Dave: If you’re done next year you could just get it out there …
Eric: I can prove to you conclusively prove to you that customers wont pay a premium for that efficiency target. How much time could we save from this product development effort ? And in this case it was something like 4 of the 5 years could be saved. It was really dramatic. I’m not saying that customers don’t value efficiency, I’m saying we need to go find out.
Chris: Lets find out if they ‘ll pay for it that’s the key thing
Eric: Exactly right. That’s the logic. This elaborate business plan … these guys had this business plan 100 pages and all these spreadsheets and it was a very disciplined detailed business plan. Buried in footnote 25 and appendix D in the very fine, fine print is what we call this leap of faith assumption that says – by the way customer customer will pay a premium for this efficiency. If you take that statement and make it false then the whole house cards comes tumbling down.
Chris: So how do you deal with it then because the thing that always bugs me about it.. and you talk about this in the book obviously .. is the siloed structures. For established companies, theres these siloed structures. Here’s marketing here’s R & D
Eric: Oh yeah
Chris: Here is sales and then like at some point the price gets set, at some point the specs get set, at some point you know, how you’re gonna sell it gets set and it’s like unless you … I don’t get how that happens otherwise unless you just smash everyone together.
Eric: You make gazpacho …yeah.
Eric: So what we’re talking about is a completely different management system. It’s like a different compatible operating system than people are used to using in established companies. You have to change …
Chris: So when you come in are you… when you go to a company consulting, do you pretty much say well you have to do this or you’re screwed? How do you actually effect the change in these big monolithic corporations?
Eric: I’m the world’s worst consultant because … think about it someone like me gets called in as a consultant what happened? Some manager somewhere read my book and they gave it to their boss and said hey you will love this book. Anyway someone important finally reads this book – and they say lets get this guy in as a consultant and some underling calls me and says you gotta come in so and so important person wants to talk to you and I say ok. I come in and give him the talk or something and my talk is just hey exactly what was in the book but in a talk and so we have a conversation. A senior manager alway comes in, if they like it they say ok I want to do this in my company but they are hoping it’s gonna .. What do we do next I’m going to pay you a lot of money as a consultant do something for me. What I think they are usually hoping is that I will tell them – you gotta fire all your employees and get some new fancy more entrepreneurial employees, put up some posters to tell everybody to be more innovative… looking for like easy cheap fixes. I am the worlds worst consultant because I tell them, listen if you are not getting the innovation you want out of your company, look in the mirror – now you are looking at the problem.
Dave: Ohhh
[Laughter]
Eric: All the innovation problems in corporate America originate first and foremost with senior management because they are setting the accountability standards and the management process that is required to be used across the whole company and it’s the wrong one.
Chris: Eric can you start telling them to throw out .. my favorite phrase is the MBA playbook. Can you start telling them to start throwing out the MBA playbook ,can you make that a thing? Cause I’ll never make it a thing.
Eric: I am honest to god working on that.
Chris: Ok good I like that
Eric: And what’s interesting is of course I’m not telling them that they should never hire any MBAs and that the traditional management systems that worked for them in the past – they still work for certain kinds of business. Every modern company has a portfolio and some parts of the portfolio are those things. Those products you’ve been making for a hundred years and you’re on version 95 and you know the customers well and it’s an incremental improvement. Traditional management forecasting works great for those kind of products. What I’m saying is when you’re at the start up part of portfolio. You have to use a different playbook, to use the phrase, a different standard a different set of management practices. That means no silos, no hand offs, no part time work. We need full time engaged small teams with secure funding, with a clear mandate and the ability to pivot. And most senior managers that I’ve said that to have been – get the hell out of here, you’re scary like. No way, I wanted posters inaudible [?] … so you’re fired! 1:00:46.0
Chris: What they are really saying is I’m afraid for my job.
Eric: Yes the things that I did in my career that made me successful, that got me to this senior job, you’re telling me they aren’t the best things? I have to change .. It’s not easy and we have a lot of problems in corporate America including the short term focus on the stock market and all this kind of stuff that says hey maybe if you just hang on a little longer in your high paying senior managers job this will be the next persons problem.
Dave: Golden parachuuuuute!
Eric: Theres actually a very small number of extremely impressive, to me anyway, managers who have had both the integrity and the foresight to say ok let’s go test that.  If I’m the problem, let’s go see if I can be the solution. The last year if my life was spent in very large companies, working to make this transformation happen and I was a sceptic at the beginning I didn’t think big companies could do this kind of stuff but I’m now seeing first hand that it is possible. If senior management is willing to change the way they behave, you can create the environment that allows internal start ups to succeed.
Dave: What you need to do is approach them when they are in the position of going under. Losing their jobs and everything else. Then they are a bit more willing, they’re a bit more willing, when their feet are on fire.
Eric: Yeah fair enough.
Chris: So we just have .. we have to get going soon so a couple of quick questions from the audience. One thing that came up in some of the questions is just about the iteration of hardware in general which we kind of touched on a little bit. So I can’t read this name .. ohhh I can’t read this name on Reddit of course …
Eric: Of course
Chris: How do you fight the need to get it right the first time thing? I mean we kind of talked about that a little bit but you know .. You set the MVP at a year at some places, when you come in and you say this is what we have .. someone is saying we have to get it right first time around how do you respond to that kind of thing?
Eric: The problem is .. there’s 2 different kinds of risk with MVP that we need to deal with.. whats called external risk and internal risk. So an external risk is something like if the device doesn’t work as advertised someone could die. It could explode. I mean the reason I like software so much more than hardware is that things rarely actually literally explode but you know in hardware things explode, people die. So we have safety standards, regulatory issues. Those kinds of risks most of the companies and professionals that I work with know how to mitigate those risks and MVP is not about compromising on those standards. That would be a laughably bad idea. But a huge amount of the delay in building a new product in hardware is often stuff to do with internal risks.
Eric: My personal professional pride, you know I’m embarrassed about the way this thing looks. It’s not on the schedule, the official internal process. I am amazed at how many companies that have regulatory approval before they will even take the product to the regulator. They will go through years of their internal bureaucracy to decide that it is time to go and talk to someone outside so it’s all these internal delays. People are like it’s the risk of .. What if the thing comes not on time? What if we have a delay in the schedule? That’s not actually a risk. Customers don’t care. What if I don’t follow the checklist – nobody cares. What if it comes in over budget? Nobody cares – like your customers don’t care that’s all purely internal.
Dave: Customers don’t care about anything at all! Except the final product and can I get my hands on it? When and how much?
Eric: Exactly right. Does this solve a problem for me does it help me in some way ? Does it work at a good price? That is what matters. So most of the delays with MVPs are really internal. People’s egos, internal process. So once you clear that crap out of the way it’s a rare company that can’t get to market a lot faster. Then you have the courage to take in that initial feedback and keep iterating, keep experimenting, keep going. So there’s still that requirement to have perseverance and dedication. In fact, I think of the Lean Startup as a system for short term action in the service of a long term vision. If you don’t have a long term vision this is all a waste of time.
Chris: One last thing here- cause I know you have to go. With hardware and shipping it quickly.. How do you actually segment if it works or not, if it’s half baked .. You cant just ship it them out of the product that kind of thing.
Eric: Yeah, you have to set up the architecture of both a business model and the physical architecture to allow you do do physical iteration. You do that in one of two ways. For some products, you come out with a new version when you come out with a new version. So think about the early original Iphone. It didn’t have copy paste, it didn’t have 3g, it was missing all kinds of features. Some would just go and launch it you know – and a year later you come out with a better product and that’s one possibility. 1:05:47.7
Eric: Give you another completely different example and again it comes from another hardware… this is another heavy industrial equipment company. This is the product that’s used in power plants so it has a very, very long life. You put this product to market traditionally and it runs for decades.  Of course there’s a service contract so your parts wear out you come in and fix them but basically it’s a huge up front sale and the customer runs it. So we were talking about how do we get into a faster build measure learn cadence with our customer in this situation? One one of the things that … this happens to be a product where because parts wear out there’s actually two different kinds of components there’s the actual physical frame architecture of how the thing is actually built and put together and then there are the high tech components inside of it that wear out. Does that makes sense?
Dave: Yeah yeah
Eric: So what if we were to give you today a product .. instead of waiting 5 years for a product to come out, we’re going to give you a product today that has the new architecture but today’s materials and today’s technology. So it will have all the benefits of inevitable thing but here’s what we proposed. Instead of a service contract let’s do a business model innovation. We’re going to offer you this product on an upgrade path. So every year we’re gonna come back to you and give you the option for us to install the latest, greatest materials on the inside of this architecture. So we can upgrade it for you every year and we will have a pre-negotiated contract where you pay us for the performance improvements of those upgrades. So if we improve the efficiency of the machine etc then we get paid more than we do today. Then instead of just getting one major improvement 5 years from now – we can promise you yearly improvements from now for the next 30 years.
Chris: Wow
Eric: So think about whats required to do that? This goes back to your question about silos and stuff like … That requires a complete change in the way we build the product, the way we market the product, who our customers are. The service agreement is now completely different, the way the customer pays is different, the financial models, remember the margins are … It changes a lot of things about the corporation.
Chris: It does
Eric: In order to do a product like that you have to have a really truly cross-functional team. A startup – working on it together.
Chris: I was also reading about the transition as well the I know the thing of transitioning from a start up mentality. Maintaining that throughout as you move into a longer term life cycle as well.
Eric: Yeah exactly right.
Chris: Alright well, Dave you got anything else for Eric here?
Dave: No we better wrap it up. I know we do have some Reddit questions but I’m not sure if ..
Chris: A lot of them were covered in the …
Dave: Cool
Chris: Not directly as we asked them but a lot of good stories there. I hope that someday you are able to publish all those stories somehow that would be really cool.
Eric: If only there was some kind of technology that for capturing stories as some data archival system .. smearing it on some kind of dead tree surface.
Eric: If anyone has an idea …
Chris: We’ll get there
Eric: One day in the future we will have that..
Chris: We’ll need a paper start-up
Eric: We have the power
Dave: Where can people buy your book and where can they follow you and read your stuff ?
Eric: OK so let’s see the book is called the Lean Start-up, you can buy it at Amazon and anywhere fine books are sold.
Dave: Is it available on Kindle? 1:09:22.8
Eric: It is on Kindle and god knows what else.. you can see all the different platforms at the leanstartup.com. We have a conference once a year called the lean start up conference that has a website called leanstartup.co. Our next conference is the week of December 9th in San Francisco.
Eric: I’m @ericries on Twitter, you can follow me and get all kinds of spam about all the great things that I’m doing including what I ate for lunch etc. And the most Important resource I think, far more important than any of the stuff I have to say, is the fact meet-up groups are around the world so if you google for lean start up circles or lean start up meet ups unless you are in a very very remote place, in which case how are you getting this podcast? It’s very likely that there’s already a lean start up meet up in your city, a lot of places have a monthly or more frequent get together where entrepreneurs can work with each other to advance the state of the art in entrepreneurship and I think that’s when the most important work is being done.
Dave: One last quick question. Do you see any competition with other forms of start up methodology? If I’m using the correct…
Eric: Listen I wish we had more competition.
Dave: That’s the correct answer than you very much!
Eric: There’s a lot of good work being done in startup theory if you will now. Steve Blank who is a mentor of mine who writes about customer development and a lot about lean startup which I think is a very important resource. Theres Business Model Generation and other kind of … there’s a great book called ‘Founders Dilemmas’ by an academic at Harvard that talks about a research based look at some of these entrepreneurial challenges. But honestly the biggest competition is just the inertia of people doing things the old way and just assuming that’s the only way. I think that’s the number one issue.
Chris: Alright
Dave: Awesome. Thank you very much for joining us Eric. It’s been awesome and this has been by far our largest wank word filled episode so far.
Chris: And it’s been awesome.
Eric: Thank you very much, I appreciate the compliment.
Dave: No worries. Thanks mate.
Eric: Alright take care guys bye bye.
Chris: Bye bye.
Dave: See ya. 1:11:38.0

The post #159 – Transcript – Interview with Eric Ries of the Lean Startup first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

DJ
I’m Dave Jones from the EEVblog.
CG
I’m Chris Gammell of Chris Gammell’s Analog Life.
Psst … and your line is ..
JE
And I’m Jeri Ellsworth and I missed my cue!
CG
Hey Jeri! She’s back!
DJ
It’s been a long time – what is it … 2 years?
JE
Something like that. Someone on Twitter was saying it has been 100 episodes so it’s not a surprise that I missed my cue to go!
CG
You’re fired Jeri, you’re fired.
DJ
Well thank you very much for joining us because we know that you are super-duper busy.
JE
Oh yes, things are just going nuts over here right now.
DJ
How many hours sleep a day are you getting?
JE
Well, er, we just did a public reveal at Maker Fair and leading up to that we were getting, like 5 or 6 hours a night. It was like 16 and 18 hour days, it was ridiculous. But now that I’ve come back I’ve slept, like, 8 or 9 hours a day for the last 3 days – and took ALL WEEKEND off! It felt weird.

CG
That’s awesome. Luxury.

JE
Yeah. We’ve been going like this for 3-3.5 months.
CG
That really starts to wear on you. That can make you go crazy at certain points.
JE
Yeah, there were times that my partner Rick and I were a little snippy with each other.
DJ
Yeah, but you’re still young and carefree, you can handle it. Come on, suck it up!
JE
Yeah, that’s what I keep telling myself.
CG
So for the 3 or 4 people in the world who didn’t see the article or hear us talking about it last week, could you tell us just about the project you have been working on so that we could have a baseline of what you have been doing?
JE
Absolutely. So I started working with Valve Software (***) about a year and a half ago. And when I got there I was given the mandate to research everything video game-related in the hardware space. So we started looking at input devices, output devices, virtual reality, augmented reality, and a few months into working there I got really excited about augmented reality. And started looking at every type of AR glasses that were out there.
DJ
Why is that – why did AR excite you?
JE
At first it didn’t. I thought it was kind of a limited medium to work with, but as we started researching it a bit more I got excited and thought hey there is a lot of things that you can do in this space and it looks like there might be some possibility for lightweight glasses that someday will be on the market.
DJ
Right.
JE
Yeah, so I really started researching that a lot and then part-way through last year, I kind of stumbled onto this technique that to do AR glasses in a very low-cost way, which instead of trying to put the light directly into your eyes, which is the most common approach, we project from the glasses using little micro projectors to a special surface that is highly directional. It’s called Retro Reflective.
DJ
It’s on the moon. The Apollo 11 put a retro reflector on the moon and regardless of what angle you fire a laser at, it comes back directly to you.
CG
[laughs] Right into your eyeball actually!
DJ
Yeah! It’s great!
JE
Exactly. So we are using this retro reflective material that they use on road signs – regular freeway signs. They look really bright at a distance. It is because they have this retro reflective property to them. So by using that in conjunction with these little tiny projectors on glasses, we can project out to the surface and 90% of the light that leaves the glasses comes back.
So you don’t have to project very many photons out to the surface to get a very bright, vivid image coming back.
DJ
Right.
JE
Upside is the glasses can be extremely small and lightweight. Downside is you just have to roll out the surface before you start playing your video games.
And so that’s what I worked on at Valve, that was my primary project. There’s a lot of challenges around that, so we several of us started working on the head tracker. You have to track the user’s head position, so that was a critical piece of it.
We developed a head tracker – most of this actually happened outside of Valve after getting laid off. We developed a head tracker that uses cell phone image sensors that are super low-cost, like $1-2 image sensors, and then we did some tricks on the optical paths so that we could detect LEDs with a super high precision. So at 3 metres distance we can do sub millimetre accuracy.
DJ
Nice!
JE
Yeah! A funny story around developing that we put this whole camera system together and it was, like, wow this seems pretty accurate. I gave it to Rick my business partner, and he started doing the software side of it and he was like, Jeri, no, I keep seeing noise, I think there’s something wrong with your circuit. So I get up and I start walking over there and he’s like wait a minute. Jump up and down and so I jump up and down … it was just me tapping my feet and rolling my chair!
DJ
Oh no!
CG
It was so accurate that the ground, the table did it. Is that the idea?
JE
Yeah, yeah it was just like vibrations through the floor.
DJ
Wow!
JE
So to have to actually maybe I should take a step back before getting into all the tech. maybe I should explain what you see when you look through the glasses.
CG
Yeah.
JE
And why it’s important to have this super high accuracy head position tracker. So you roll out the surface, it’s just kind of a matt grey surface, and we can project 3D objects onto the surface, below the surface, at the surface or above the surface.
CG
Below the surface, that’s interesting.
JE
Yeah. Say you roll out a matt – imagine like a flat surface – you can project as much as you want onto the surface so you could make it look like a table. There’s this huge void that opens up and extends for infinity. You can have stuff drop down in there. One of our experiences that we show is a block-type game, like a Jenga-type game where blocks are stacked above the surface.
CG
But not Jenga of course, right? That’s what you guys said in the video.
JE
Yeah. Rick called it Jurga. I guess I suggested Jenga and he knew he would get sued into the ground if we used Jenga.
CG
You started a good idea.
JE
So the blocks are rendered above the surface, it looks like they are sitting above the surface.
DJ
You’re not thinking big enough Jeri! [0:55:25]
CG
I was going to say that! I can’t help thinking that eventually someone’s going to look back and say what the hell were they thinking not charging more for this kind of thing? I know that’s my inner business brain talking and it’s like really terrible but honestly you guys are making some really cool stuff and it seems really reasonably priced and I guess that’s a really good way to get the market though. [0:55:49]
JE
Well it’s really early, you know. I don’t want anyone to commit us to that price point. We may discover that we botch our first 3A6 and now we have to charge more or something. [0:55:02]
Well we envisioned folks will have their glasses, they’ll go over to their buddy’s house and they’ll all sit around the table and they’ll hook it up to their cell phone and play together. But if it becomes too expensive for a system then … [0:56:21]
CG
Yeah, it’s the doom of a lot of systems actually. I remember hearing about some of those where they were $600 a system of something and no-one bought it. You can’t get any foothold then. Games are usually where they make the money anyway. [0:56:35]
DJ
Well they reckon that $300 is the consumer price point where if it is under that it is an impulse buy, if it is over that they um and ah. [0:56:51]
CG
I have a question about the cell phones because I was intrigued by you saying you are hooking up to those. Cell phones are notorious for having very slow interfaces to them. How the heck are you going to actually talk to them? Are you planning on doing wireless eventually? [0:57:06]
JE
Oh, so a lot more cell phones and tablets are coming out with H IOUT so that’s what we need to do to explore the video interface. And since all of our tracking is done in hardware it is actually a very, very slow data stream going back. The only thing that we need to be very careful about is that there is very low latency going back. [0:57:29]
One of the challenges in augmented reality is that if there is latency, say from the head tracker, you move your head and it takes 4 or 5 frames to update, it makes it look like all the objects that you are rendering in the world just jumped to the side. They don’t track smoothly. So we have done a lot of work to keep the frame rate up to 120 hertz, the tracker is running at 120 hertz. [0:57:56]
CG
Which doesn’t sound like much but for video that’s a ton. Most videos are what 30 hertz? Is that right? [0:58:03]
DJ
In Australia it’s 25 hertz. [0:58:05]
CG
Does that translate to frames per second? That’s what I’m thinking. [0:58:11]
JE
Yes. [0:58:12]
CG
Because movies are 24, home videos are 29 or 30. [0:58:16]
JE
The real magic started for us over 100 hertz. That’s where it really started feeling like these Jenga blocks or Jerga blocks are on the surface. Along with some predictions. So you can predict where you head is moving. So with prediction and having very low latency it really looks like as you walk around the table that those blocks are really there. When you smash them with the wand it looks like they are really flying up towards your face. [0:58:45]
CG
Why 100 hertz then? Is that just based on human reaction times? [0:58:50]
JE
I’m not really sure. We tried 60 hertz, that was pretty good, but getting over 100 hertz really looked good. And so all the demos that we presented at Maker Fair were at least over 100 hertz. [0:59:05]
And modern cell phones are getting really powerful. There is some hot stuff in the pipeline coming out for chips. [0:59:15]
CG
So you’re saying that data going back down the pipe to the cell phone – you can’t talk through HDMI can you? How are you actually inputting data? That’s what I’m always not sure about. There’s no way to hook to data. [0:59:31]
DJ
You’ve got to have a standardized interface. For these glasses to work with any gaming system are you looking to provide an interface for each system or are you going to leave that up to the manufacturers? [0:59:43]
JE
Many cell phones these days have USB on the go and they have digital video out, so our plan is to use USB and HDMI out. [0:59:56]
CG
OK. I didn’t know that cell phones were using USB on the go. Because that’s the one where it goes, it can be host or device, right? [1:00:05]
JE
Yeah, we’re going to see more and more devices like that. I can describe what the glasses look like – the current ones are kind of big and weigh several hundred grams. Lots of hot glue on them! So we have mocked up, using real projection engines, what we think we can do for the glasses. There are about 60 grams of weight. Then with the serializers we have reduced it down to just a few pairs of micro coax down the cable, so the cable that we are currently using is about what you would think of for, like, ear buds. Like iPod earbuds. It’s got that thickness. And that’s what we demonstrated at Maker Fair. [1:01:00]
And then it goes to a box and this box doesn’t have to be very big but this is where if there is a battery that’s where it would live and there’s some receivers for the HDMI videos. There’s not much going on there. And then from there that’s where the connections go to your PC or your tablet or your phone. [1:01:20]
DJ
Right, so all the processing is still done in the glasses? [1:01:23]
JE
Yeah, and we need it close to the image sensor because we pull the data off the image sensor and we process it immediately and we get the latency really low so it is right up next to the image sensor, just screaming along as fast as it can go. [1:01:36]
DJ
Yeah, you can’t send it down a couple of metres of cable, right? [1:01:38]
JE
No! Unfortunately not. [1:01:39]
CG
Yeah. Cable gets real expensive then. Even then, even with optical, you wouldn’t be able to do it, there’s still latency. [1:01:49]
JE
Yeah, so there’s going to be one ASIC that’s sitting up on the glasses that’s doing all this image tracking. And that just sends point data down to the cell phone. That’s also a huge thing, doing most of the processing on the ASIC. The phones are still a little bit anaemic as far as processing is concerned. We can’t have them processing entire frames of video, there would just be no way to do it. It has to be done up on the glasses. [1:02:19]
DJ
Ultimately what’s the data rate coming back from the glasses after it gets out of the ASIC? You said it’s low but is it kilobits, is it megabits? [1:02:27]
JE
On our current prototype we are just using 115 2 RS – we are not even close to saturating that. [1:02:38]
DJ
So serial? Right. [1:02:39]
JE
Yeah, and we’re not even close to saturating that. [02:40]
DJ
Right, old school. ASCI position. Great. I love it. [1:02:46]
JE
Yeah, we may just leave that exposed, who knows? We were talking to some folks at Maker Fair who were looking at our tracker and they want to do robotics with that. We said oh sure, maybe the tracker we will spit out and let people do other stuff with it. [1:03:03]
CG
Number one feature request in Maker Fair is hackable, right? That seems to fit. [1:03:08]
JE
Well if anyone knows my projects I always try to make them hackable. This one will certainly have Easter eggs. [1:03:18]
CG
Yes, we need to ask – are there any fart jokes in this one that we should expect? [1:03:22]
JE
Ah … well [1:03:27]
CG
Like you hit a Jenga block and it melts into a puke or something?! [1:03:28]
JE
You’ll just have to come to the Kickstarter so you can see! [1:03:35]
DJ
And join one of the road shows?! [1:03:38]
JE
This will be different though. I was always getting myself in trouble with other companies by adding Easter eggs, but it is Rick and I’s company so it is just us. [1:03:48]
CG
I’m the boss! [1:03:50]
JE
Yeah! [1:03:52]
DJ
So do you think you will have to bring on other software people? Because there’s an awful lot of software – if you want to develop real apps and real demo games and stuff like that, that is a lot of work. I would suspect, being a non game programmer … [1:04:08]
JE
You’re absolutely right. As soon as we get funding we are going to have to start staffing up. We’re staffing up right now but it is coming out of our own pocket so it is kind of limited. But this will turn into more of a software project than a hardware project in the end. Just like what you said earlier, the revenue streams will probably come from the software more than hardware. [1:04:35]
CG
Yeah, that’s just the game industry though. [1:04:36]
JE
Our hope is to offer a place to curate other people’s stuff. We want people to make money on this. We want people to make things and give it away. [1:04:48]
CG
Like a marketplace kind of thing? [1:04:49]
JE
Yeah. At least direct people where they can go and get it. We don’t want to be a walled-off garden like some people – Apple and some of these places where I can’t even … if I write a program I can’t even give it to you guys I have to go through Apple to deliver it. We hope to be more open than that. [1:05:09]
DJ
Yeah. That’s good. I think that’ll pay dividends. [1:05:13]
CG
Once you get funding is this like Jeri hops on a plane? Are you going to go to China for a while do you think? Is that looking too far forward? [1:05:27]
JE
Well, I’m accustomed to doing manufacturing in China and I’d like to do it domestically but I just don’t know if that’s possible yet. That’s something we’re going to look at. [1:05:41]
CG
I wasn’t even asking about that. I expect people to go to China, honestly. I mean, like, that’s kind of the Kickstarter thing, obviously you have done it before but that would be the different point from a lot of Kickstarter projects. People are shocked by having to go to China. You’re like, oh I have to go back to China. [1:06:00]
JE
Actually I have been kind of following a bunch of Kickstarters over the last few months and it’s kind of a pitfall for some of those guys. They’re like, we’re going to make this thing, but they’ve never done it before and they find out that China’s hard! [1:06:16]
DJ
Even if you’ve done it before! I mean, things can go wrong and you can be back to square one and oh damn. Not quite square one but just little things can mess things up. [1:06:30]
JE
Yeah, that’s why we suspect that we are going to take secondary funding besides Kickstarter. We suspect, especially since Maker Fair, and how people were really positive about it, that we will probably do fairly well on Kickstarter. [1:06:42]
CG
Oh hell, yeah! [1:06:44]
DJ
I guarantee you will! [1:06:47]
JE
But the software side is what’s really going to make it magical and we’ll probably have to take on some investment from VCs. It will be interesting, not many people have gone down this route before. So it will be interesting to see how VCs react to us saying we have got so many hundred thousand in the bank or whatever that money we get from Kickstarter is. It would be sure nice to have another 5 million. [1:07:19]
CG
Yeah! I could get a lot of chips for that! [1:07:22]
DJ
I’ll trade you all my C64 chips, you can tell them that, right? Use that as collateral. [1:07:28]
JE
Oh there you go! My retirement fund is on my C64 chips. [1:07:32]
CG
Maybe while you’re over there you can get them all packaged up too. You can be since I’ve already done the sweetheart deal we’ve got all these chips you can just package those old C64 chips. [1:07:46]
JE
I’d love to do something with those someday. But it looks like it’s going to be off in the future somewhere. [1:07:51]
CG
Oh yeah. You’re going to be busy. I’m guessing this is going to be the last time we talk to you for a couple of years. [1:07:56]
JE
Maybe. It’s going to be pretty crazy. It’s going to be fun though. [1:08:01]
CG
Good crazy. [1:08:02]
JE
It’s interesting being on this side of a start up. I’ve done contract work for a good part of a decade and walked into a lot of start ups. Been number 5 or 6 person in the door and we’re starting from scratch and they’re just getting their funding. Seeing in from that perspective, now reversing the roles and being the one out trying to scrounge up the funding is quite different. [1:08:28]
Not only do you have to do all the design work, you have to do the funding part of it too. [1:08:32]
CG
I think you’re doing it right though, I mean having the prototypes to show is ahead of a lot of start ups. A lot of them are vapour ware, not a lot of them, but some of them are. You’re just trying to go on an idea first because you don’t have the money to even bootstrap the stuff and the fact that you guys are bootstrapping the early protos, that’s a really good sign. [1:08:53]
JE
Yeah, Rick and I thought that was very important, that we get it out there really early and show that it’s real. Because there is so much vapour ware out there and especially around gaming hardware. We were talking to some folks that wanted to look at it. They were really very dubious because we were trying to get some meetings going, we were like hey guys this is what it is. Stop by the Maker Fair booth and kick the tires. They were wanting us to do some videos and supply them with a bunch of stuff. We said just come and take a look at it, it’s real! [1:09:35]
And it was pretty nice when they came out and tried it for the first time. They were like, holy, woo. [1:09:44]
CG
They were probably pissed that they didn’t get to see it privately first but, you know, that’s a good thing. That’s really different, that’s cool.
I have to say I want you to be careful with VCs, they seem, I don’t know. It seems like some of them are really good but some of them just, meh. [1:10:00]
DJ
ALL of them! Come on! [1:10:01]
CG
Not all of them. Some of them do good work. There’s some good ones out there, but some are just … [1:10:06]
DJ
But ultimately it doesn’t matter who they are they are in it for the money. They want to make a massive profit for their risk. End of story. [1:10:16]
CG
Yes, you’re not wrong. [1:10:17]
JE
We have all heard the horror stories. [1:10:20]
DJ
There are no nice VCs, they’re all the same. Some are nicer people than others, but ultimately no they invest in risky stuff and they expect a large return for that large amount of risk. And they will pressure you into doing all sorts of things to achieve that end. [1:10:38]
JE
And they are very good a lot of times to give you just enough to get you on the edge of success and then when you are desperate for that last little bit of money then it’s like, well for another 50% of your company we will … [1:10:54]
DJ
Yes. And you’re left holding the bag. [1:10:57]
JE
I’ve certainly seen that. [1:10:58]
CG
That’s no fun. So be careful! [1:11:01]
JE
Well that’s why I’m excited about the crowd sourcing. We want to show this is for real. We have this credibility. We’ve done this before. It works. [1:11:15]
DJ
But you’ve got the pressure to produce then if you get 10,000 people backing it then you’ve got 10,000 people screaming at you, where’s my glasses?! [1:11:23]
JE
Which is kind of a scary thing. The production runs that I’m used to are in the hundreds of thousands in toys. [1:11:35]
DJ
This will be under 10K. [1:11:36]
JE
Yeah, I mean I don’t know in the history of Kickstarter if there’s any projects that have sold more than like 10K but that’s probably pretty typical for a Kickstarter that’s very successful. [1:11:49]
DJ
It’s usually a couple of thousand I have been seeing for hardware-type projects. But because this is a gamer and gamers go crazy about this sort of stuff you could reach 5 figures. [1:11:58]
CG
One was 60,000 watches I think. That was a lower cost as well. [1:12:05]
JE
So we are crunching a bunch of numbers. It’s scenarios, what if. What if only 10 people order, what if 100,000 order. We want to try to be prepared. [1:12:32]
DJ
Yep, it’s important because that changes the entire game, doesn’t it? In terms of manufacturing and design for manufacturing. Really. [1:12:40]
JE
Exactly. [1:12:41]
DJ
I mean you may have to make some large design changes based on how many orders you get. [1:12:50]
JE
It’s unfortunate that the difference between NRE for manufacturing 1,000 units versus 100,000 units is not much. It’s all the same amount of work. [1:13:05]
CG
Yep. And then they want to charge you again when you go back after that first 1,000. They’re like, oh you want another 1,000? There’s a fee. [1:13:15]
JE
Yeah. [1:13:16]
CG
You could just charge $1,500 per prototype effectively. Suckers like me might pay it. [1:13:25]
DJ
You’ve been suckered, yes Chris. You suckered into winning. [1:13:31]
CG
Yeah, you should have people winning Jeri. [1:13:33]
JE
I missed that, was it the glass you had to win? [1:13:37]
CG
Yeah, you had to do stuff on Twitter and Google Plus and if you said what you were going to use it for they would pick something. I just put some random stuff on there, building hardware around it, and I got yeah you won. But it didn’t matter, a lot of people said I would use it to video record stuff. Anyways. [1:13:55]
DJ
But by ‘winning’ they meant you get the opportunity to buy it first for $1,500. You don’t actually win anything, you just win the opportunity to buy it. [1:14:03]
JE
Gotcha.
Now you’ve brought up Google Glass, the number one thing that we get asked is what’s the difference between this and Google Glass. [1:15:12]
CG
Everything, right? The similarity starts at the Pico projector and ends at the Pico projector. [1:15:19]
JE
Yeah, pretty much. [1:14:20]
DJ
Oh goodness. Do you actually have any competitors in this space at the moment? Are there any other Kickstarter projects or start ups or people doing similar? [1:14:34]
JE
I think Occulis is probably the adjacent, they are a different experience but there’s a lot of overlap so that’s pretty cool. There are some consumer products out there but they are all really expensive. They are usually typically the collimated displays, set to infinity and they project directly into your eyes. They are usually a very limited field of view. Quite different. [1:15:04]
The best thing that we saw there was like a Korean company, I forget the name of it, but they had kind of heavy but pretty wide field of view glasses that worked fairly well. But they had no tracking, no audio on them. [1:15:21]
Oh the audio, oh boy, I can’t wait. It’s the thing I’m the most excited about since we have head position we can do all kinds of fun things with audio. You can get little zombies standing on the table, you could put your head right down next to the zombie and hear him. [1:15:38]
CG
You think he’s whispering or something? [1:15:40]
DJ
That’s awesome! [1:15:44]
JE
I suspect that there’s going to be entire games that just used head position and sound and almost no graphics at all. [1:15:24]
DJ
Yeah I can imagine that. [1:15:54]
CG
Oh man, like where in the world is Carmen Sandiago? You could totally replicate that. All the board games of our youth you could totally replicate those, which is so much fun. Like Risk, oh my God, Risk could be amazing. [1:16:06]
What about the tracking though. You said you have the vision tracking, you are actually looking at these modulated LEDs and stuff. I do have a question about that. Are you using like a 9 axis controller, is that the idea for actually moving your head and everything where it streams out data? [1:16:30]
JE
Yeah. Sure, I can talk about it. It sends out points which are just X Y and some other magic source that we have in there and that goes out to the host, which then solves for world position so there’s some math behind that that figures out where you are in the world from all these points that are coming down. That’s pretty much it. [1:16:54]
So if you rotate your head we can detect the rotation. If you move laterally we can pick that up. Anywhere within a volume we can figure out where you are at. [1:17:05]
DJ
And this is just done with the IR? [1:17:09}
JE
Yes, IR LEDs. [1:17:12]
DJ
Right, OK. So it is just IR transmitting from the surface and then the … [1:17:17]
JE
The camera is on the glasses. [1:17:19]
DJ
What type of sensor? Right, you’ve just got a camera. How many pixels? [1:17:22]
JE
It really doesn’t matter on the pixels all that much. It does affect the precision. We’re just using a standard HD image sensor right now from a cell phone.
It’s a really crappy rolling shutter image sensor which there was a lot of debate within Valve whether it would work and we never got that far within the company but as soon as we got out, we were like alright, they’ve got their tech, we can’t use that, so we’ve gotta do our own. So we went down this other path and holy smokes, it worked! [1:17:54]
CG
So you don’t have external like an IMU type of chip externally? [1:18:03]
JE
No giros, nothing. [1:18:06]
DJ
It’s just the angles and math? That’s it. [1:18:11]
CG
Lots of math! [1:18:12]
DJ
Yeah, lots of math. Well basic trigonometry right? [1:18:18]
CG
The other question I have is so the camera is only looking at the IR LEDs is that the idea? Is that what it does? [1:18:26]
JE
The reason we didn’t use IMUs, they are pretty good at very short timespans like they know that you moved but they are not good at anything, they drift extremely badly. [1:18:43]
You can’t do any kind of translation with them, they can’t figure out if you moved laterally. You can figure out rotation and you can use gravity to figure out that. There’s magnetometers which you can kind of figure out rotation with but … [1:19:01]
DJ
Now it’s getting ugly. [1:19:02]
JE
Yeah, it’s kind of a dead en d path using that. It’s not accurate. [1:19:06]
CG
Yeah, you need to filter the crap out of them. My buddy did a project on that and basically the math on that is accelerometers you need to basically integrate them twice and then if you think about any jitter in the acceleration then that translates in to huge errors in your integration. [1:19:23]
DJ
As Jeri said it’s a complete dead end. You just cannot make it work. Simple as that. [1:19:29]
JE
Yeah, it works great for cell phones and things like that. [1:19:32]
DJ
Oh yeah, for those limited things. [1:19:33]
JE
Where you don’t want things to look like they are really in the world but if you want to have something around your figurine and you want things locked to the figurine you have gotta have absolute measurements so that’s why were’ doing pure optical.
So the majority of our time after leaving Valve was just refining this tracker and that’s what’s really special about our system. At Valve we had a system that was like $20-30,000, it was a really military grade tracking system. We are achieving that with $8 worth of parts! [1:20:06]
CG
That is magical! Really impressive Jeri. [1:20:10]
JE
It surprised me too that we got that kind of accuracy. We just kept pushing it and we kept fussing with the optics and it just got better. Oh, hey it just got better.
Our very first experiments, the jitter was so bad. We were doing full frame captures, sending it down to the PC. The PC was looking at these paper markers. The result looked like you were in a bouncy car or something. These little characters were jumping all over and bouncing and now it is just rock solid. You can get down and really close to them. There’s just a tiny bit of jitter but it is acceptable. [1:20:55]
CG
OK. So another question. With the IR LEDs that’s how you track it. You said you can move down towards the characters and you can they can whisper to you or whatever. As you move towards the surface do you ever lose track of the LEDs? Do things get in the way depending how you move your head? Do you lose track of absolute position because you aren’t pointed right at the other user? What happens then? [1:21:29]
JE
Right now we have one cluster of LEDs, just mainly because we didn’t have time to work on putting them all around the edge. So we have over 100 degree field of view on our camera and so it is really wide so you can be way off axis and still track. But if you put your hand in front of the camera, which is dead centre between your eyes, you can lose track that way. You can get within inches of the surface and currently with only one cluster of LEDs on there you lose track, like 4 inches away or something. It’s pretty good. Definitely needs some improvement there as far as having robustness by having more LEDs around the surface. [1:22:11]
CG
OK. So as the playing field evolves you might be able to change that? [1:22:16]
JE
You need a certain number of them, you need about 5 points to keep track of the surface. So you get below that and things go bad really fast. [1:22:31]
DJ
So your key technology here is the imaging, ASIC and processing? [1:22:39]
JE
That’s it! Actually, with all the work, it’s been like a year and a half worth of work. We looked at everything, laser projectors right in the eye, all the display tech. In the end the display tech ended up being the simplest thing. It was just dual Pico projectors or a stereo image. It all boiled down to $8 worth of electronics for the tracker. That’s the magic. It’s like get the total building materials down to a point where we can sell it for this low cost. [1:23:16]
So yeah, it’s disappointingly simple in the end! [1:23:21]
CG
No, there’s a lot of magic in there. That’s a lot of math. It sounds like a lot of math, math. [1:23:29]
DJ
No, but as a start up you’ve got to have a sellable core technology. That’s quite important, not just oh we got our costs down to $8 or whatever. You said it before, a lot of people could use this in other areas, not just glasses and gaming. They could use it for other types of tracking. That’s where you could potentially sell the imaging tracking ASIC for example. [1:23:39]
JE
Exactly. Who knows where it’s going to extend itself beyond. And we hope to be on the gaming side of the revenue stream too. We think we’re creative and have good game idea. [1:24:12]
CG
Definitely. [1:24:14]
DJ
So does everyone though! But gaming, you know, how many bloody games are there? It’s incredible. [1:24:21]
CG
I’m amazed that this market continues to be so big. I shouldn’t be, but I grew up with a lot of games around me. It is big though, people just keep spending money on it. [1:24:33]
JE
It’s a dream that people have painted since we were kids on Star Wars and finally all the tech is here so we can have a comfortable non headache-inducing experience. People have tried it in the past and haven’t quite been able to pull it off with the tech. With cell phone cameras pushing everything forwards and micro projectors for cell phones. [1:24:57]
DJ
The question remains, though, will people just go wow for a little while and then cast it aside – see what I did there?! Or will it be a long-term thing? That’s the question. Will it be long-term or will they just play this is fun, this is fantastic, wow, but I don’t want to play it all day kind of thing. [1:25:22]
JE
Well personally I’m biased of course but I think people are looking for the next gaming experience that’s more sociable. You see board games are really hot, Warhammer’s really hot, all these figurine games. [1:25:40]
DJ
They’re very credibly low tech you see? They are old school, right? Rolling dice and stuff. [1:25:45]
JE
Exactly, but for me personally I would love to play like a Warhammer figurine-type game but my friends have been doing it since they were in High School and they understand it and I don’t. The hurdle of trying to figure out all the stuff about it keeps me from doing it. [1:26:07]
DJ
There’s a lot of culture involved in that. It’s not just the game itself. [1:26:13]
JE
If I don’t have to set up for 2 hours, if I can within 30 seconds roll a mat out and start playing some kind of figurine game with my glasses, that’s very appealing to me. [1:26:24]
CG
Are we going to see this in a pinball game sometime soon too? [1:26:30]
JE
Yeah, we should hook it up to visual pinball. Why don’t we throw in the home chip lab too? We could use it to monitor. [1:26:38]
CG
Oh Jeri, you cut me so deep! You’re supposed to be on my side here. [1:26:45]
DJ
All of our new audience today who are listening, all the gamers who have no idea what we are talking about, and we weren’t even trying to explain. It’s a bit of an in-joke here on the show. [1:26:53]
CG
Yes, come back and you’ll hear Dave rant on it for ever. How wrong I am.
Jeri, once this is done you have made your gazillions can you go off and fix that and make that happen next? [1:27:07]
JE
Absolutely! [1:27:09]
CG
Thank you Jeri! [1:27:10]
JE
I’m so happy to be back. You know, working at Valve I had to be so secretive. [1:27:18]
DJ
I see, outside of Valve? Right. [1:27:19]
JE
It was kind of like radio silence. All I could do was go on Twitter every once in a while. I was like I’m working on something cool, and I couldn’t talk about it. Really I’m a nerd at heart, I love coming on shows like yours and talking about what board rate we are using to communicate point data down to the host. Oh yeah, that’s the communication I should have been having all the time. [1:27:45]
DJ
That’s the problem with all large corporations like this, they really don’t like you doing stuff outside or talking about the company ‘s stuff. [1:27:54]
JE
It’s risky. [1:27:55]
DJ
Is it more secretive at Valve? [1:28:00]
CG
She can’t say, it’s secretive. [1:28:01]
DJ
The first day do you have to sign a form saying I will not say anything on Twitter? [1:28:12]
JE
Well Valve is far more open than other companies, it encourages the employees to talk to their fanbase. Unfortunately it’s no management in there to guide us so it becomes a debate, it’s like I just said something on a podcast and your colleagues are like oh my God you just revealed something. It’s like, you’re more accountable to your colleagues and then it becomes awkward trying to talk about stuff. [1:28:48]
CG
Oh there’s the talker over there! Let’s not sit with her at lunch today. [1:28:52]
DJ
So did you feel bad about that, not being able to a) release any of and b) have any time outside of Valve to work on your own stuff that interests you? [1:29:06]
JE
Going to Valve I took it very seriously. Building that team. So I put in insane amount of hours, it was incredible the amount of hours I was putting in trying to build the team up and work on these projects also. So like I said earlier, often we would recruit during the day, have our various meetings during the day, and then we would work way into the night because we were all passionate about building things. [1:29:36]
DJ
How many people did you end up with in the hardware team? Or is that proprietary company information? [1:29:43]
JE
I probably shouldn’t say that. [1:29:44]
DJ
Yeah, probably. [1:29:48]
JE
They’re all my friends. [1:29:49]
DJ
Well we know that. There were like 4 who were on this show. [1:29:55]
JE
I wish them all luck. They’re all my friends in there I want them to succeed. There is some cool stuff they’re working on and I hope it makes it out there because I want to own some of the stuff they are working on.
A lot of it has my DNA. [1:30:12]
DJ
Even if it is the competing VR. [1:30:15]
CG
So you are in charge now, you and Rick? You like have a company now. Do you have to be, like, a finance person too or what? [1:30:25]
JE
Rick is officially the Treasurer and Vice President. I am Madam President and … we had to divide this stuff up. [1:30:43]
It is really small. It’s actually really fun there’s like 5 of us working on it pretty much full-time. It feels very much family-like. It’s all in Rick’s living room. He has this big family living room. The day after we were let go I grabbed up all of my scopes and my laser cutter and we were like, dammit we are going to do this thing, I don’t care! [1:31:14]
CG
Sleepover! [1:31:15]
JE
Yeah! [1:31:16]
DJ
So you stole all the company labs did you? [1:31:21]
JE
My own stuff! [1:31:23]
DJ
Rick do you have room for 80 pinball machines? [1:31:26]
JE
I had a bunch of pinball machines at Valve, they are all sitting in his entryway right now because that’s as far as they made it. They’re all folded up. [1:31:38]
CG
They’re not active? [1:31:40]
JE
They’re not, sadly, there’s no room. So there’s 5 of us working out of his house. The laser cutter’s here, I have my little mini lathe I have to turn a few things to do some of the optics and we are all just piled in his living room. So it feels really family-like because it will get to be about 7 or 8 o’clock at night and we will cook some food and we’ll sit around and watch – we’ve got a DVD set of Scrubs. [1:32:09]
CG
Nice. I love that show. That got me through Korea! [1:32:14]
JE
So we end up watching a couple of those a night. It’s great. The creativity is awesome because we are all on top of each other. And that was one of the great things about Valve, they encourage people to be very close to each other, like artists, we’re close to programmers, and electrical engineers near mechanical engineers and stuff. And that’s exactly how we’re structuring our group. It’s like everyone’s just right there in the mix and we hope to continue you that after funding. We’ll get a real office and staff up. [1:32:47]
CG
It is interesting how that stuff changes over time. [1:32:52]
DJ
You pretty much have to devote your life to this, don’t you? You can’t really just do it, punch in 9-5. [1:32:58]
JE
We could but it would take forever. I used to always say at Valve. The team was so small there that each of us were doing the work of 5 engineers. It is still the same outside in our group. It’s like Rick is doing amazing stuff with the software, I can’t believe how much software he churns out but it’s taking him 16-18 hours a day to do it. [1:33:24]
DJ
Jeez. To someone who actually has a life outside of my blog, yeah. [1:33:31]
JE
It’s all temporary though. We know that there’s an angle here of Kickstarter and after that then we can get real staff and we can ease the load up and maybe we can do some 9-5s every once in a while. [1:33:44]
CG
Yeah, or take a day off. You just had a day off, right? [1:33:48]
JE
I did! I took all weekend off. It felt weird. So the first day I’m like, oh this is so awesome, I just slept 8 hours. And then by Saturday I was like, I had to grab my laptop and start working. By Sunday I’m like, well, we agreed that we wouldn’t work on it so I can’t go over to Rick’s and I have kind of done everything I can on my laptop. I was getting pretty antsy, so I’m glad to be back. [1:34:15]
DJ
Because time off is more important than just doing a continuous 9-5 because anyone who is developing, any engineer who is developing something, knows that if you just go oh I’ve gotta stop now when you’re on a roll you can miss some good stuff. You’ve got to reset yourself for the next day or the next week and it takes you ages to get back into it. [1:34:40]
JE
Exactly. But this is such a fun space, it is so fun to come in and try these experiments as far as user interface. It is like sometimes we just put LEDs on a box and we use that for a prop and move it around the surface. It is like oh my God look at these lemmings are getting crushed by a box. [1:35:00]
CG
That sounds really fun. [1:35:03]
jE
It’s really fun and super hard work. [1:35:05]
CG
What about timelines? Are we saying Kickstarter in a month, 3 months, what are you thinking? [1:35:11]
JE
We really don’t know. We want to make sure we have our act together. Again the game experiences and we want to be damn sure we can hit the price point. So we have to actually start doing the dance with vendors right now. The dance of here’s our projected volume. It is so tedious and annoying. [1:35:31]
CG
Oh God, I hate that stuff. They want all the details up front. You are like, I don’t know, this might not sell. [1:35:39]
JE
Exactly. So that’s part of my task, to do the vendor dance! [1:35:47]
DJ
What about a better prototype? Because if you show that sort of prototype on the Kickstarter video people might go oh I don’t know. Because you have to show your real prototype, that’s part of the Kickstarter rules now. You can’t just do that nice 3D rendered product video anymore. [1:36:09]
JE
Yeah, I think we can ride on our old prototype for a bit. We have some parts being assembled for the next revision, which is going to be closer to the 60 gram weight prototype. We’re not going to hit the 60 grams in the next one. [1:36:27]
DJ
No, but it will look more self-contained and professional, right? [1:36:31]
JE
Right, I’ve gotta do a new board layout. Right now I didn’t really try to miniaturize the boards too much so they were just 2-layer boards with a TQFP144FPGA on them. So they are huge. It is pretty amazing, we jammed them down into this size. So now I’ve got to do a multi-layer board and put a micro FPGA down there and hopefully go to see if I can talk to one of these companies that have an FPGA that will run cooler than the Altera one that we’ve got. [1:37:05]
That was an issue. Right between your eyes is where the FPGA was sitting. [1:37:15]
CG
That’s not a feature Jeri, as you kill zombies you heat up! I can feel the juices splashing on me. [1:37:20]
JE
In the lab it wasn’t too bad because we would turn it on for an hour and turn it off but when we were at Maker Fair it was running all day and it was heat soaking for hours. It wasn’t uncomfortably warm but people commented on it. So we need to show that it is not going to run warm at all. [1:37:45]
Really when we do the shrink down to the metalizer gate array it is going to run way cooler. [1:37:52]
CG
I know. It is amazing how much energy you waste on FPGAs but you just get the flexibility so it is that much better. [1:37:59]
JE
And it is kind of Band Aided together right now. All my RTL is just … I was grabbing an IP that I generated back in the Commodore 64 joystick days. It has a little 6502 hanging out, it’s got my custom pixel pipeline going in there. Nothing is gated so even in the blanking it’s like I’m happily figuring out where points are even though there’s no data there. [1:38:25]
CG
That’s awesome. [1:38:28]
DJ
We have a whole bunch of Reddit questions. [1:38:33]
CG
I think we did a lot of these. [1:38:34]
DJ
Yeah, we did. Are there any we haven’t answered? [1:38:36]
CG
Some people were asking about the source code. I was going to ask about this. Are you going to patent anything? [1:38:44]
DJ
Oh please don’t! [1:38:45]
JE
I’m sorry Dave, we do have some patents! [1:38:48]
DJ
Oh no! [1:38:49]
JE
Yeah, we’re working on patents. [1:38:54]
DJ
No, you evil person. [1:38:56]
JE
I know, but you know we have to also look at the value of our company.
CG
You have to. [1:38:59]
JE
At some point VCs might … what kind of moat do we have around our attack? A patent on our portfolio is part of that. [1:39:12]
CG
Some of it you get to encapsulate in the ASIC and the FPGA right now, right? Some of that stuff is just a case of trade secret, you aren’t just going to give that stuff away anyway. I doubt you are patenting that side of it? [1:39:27]
JE
Yes, some of the algorithms and stuff that we are working on and some of the optics tricks and stuff we are trying to protect that stuff. [1:29:36]
DJ
Right, so it is more technical, not a pattern for AR glasses with 2 Pico projectors? [1:39:45]
JE
No. [1:39:46]
DJ
Well that’s a step in the right direction at least. [1:39:49]
JE
I try not to be an evil person most of the time! [1:39:52]
CG
Yeah. [1:39:56]
JE
We’re not going to open the source. [1:40:03]
DJ
Well you’re going open source in so far as the interface, right?
JE
Yeah, we want people to happily use our stuff. [1:40:09]
DJ
Yeah, but you won’t be able to download your VHDL and Verolog code for your gate array or something like that? Yeah, we want people to happily use our stuff. [1:40:09]40:17]
JE
No, that would probably put us out of business right away. That’s my theory. Yeah, we want people to happily use our stuff. [1:40:09]40:21]
DJ
And it would be pointless too because nobody’s going to want to – the only person who is going to want to develop, take that, is a competitor. Is somebody who wants to put you out of business. Yeah, we want people to happily use our stuff. [1:40:09]40:36]
CG
There’s no point. Yeah, we want people to happily use our stuff. [1:40:09]40:44]
JE
APIs are going to be open. We want people to develop for it. It is a chicken and egg. If there’s no software for it then why buy the hardware? And vice versa. Yeah, we want people to happily use our stuff. [1:40:09]40:56]
DJ
So do you see your revenue stream coming from the hardware? Or do you see like licence rights? There’s gotta be money coming in from somewhere. [1: 41:10]
JE
We see multiple revenue streams. I’m a toy designer, I like to work on some of the props and various things that go along with it. We see selling software and the actual hardware, the glasses themselves, there’s multiple angles that we can get revenue. [1:41:30]
DJ
Sometimes a lot of companies will not make a cent on the hardware, the hardware is basically at cost to enable you to make money on the software and the other spin-off things. [1:41:43]
CG
Or at a loss. [1:41:42]
DJ
Yeah, or at a loss because that may be required. If you find the hardware is more expensive than that magic $300 price point you may have to take loss on the hardware or break even in order to make your money elsewhere. [1:41:59]
JE
Yeah, that’s one of the things we were considering when we were under the umbrella of a bigger company that could do that, but it is a little too scary for us to think about that right now. It think everything’s got to generate a little bit of revenue or at least break us even. [1:42:17]
DJ
Yeah, you wouldn’t be selling it at a loss, you would be at minimum breaking even. [1:42:24]
JE
My bank account is going down quickly putting this together. Not for long! [1:42:28]
CG
Don’t worry, you will make it up on volume Jeri. It’s cool. [1:42:31]
JE
Like the underwear gnomes? [1:42:37]
DJ
It reminds me of the joke of how do you make money on free software? Volume! [1:42:46]
JE
Exactly. [1:42:50]
CG
I think the last question was how do people work for you? Should we set up a Google Docs, what people are willing to do to sell their soul to work for Technical Illusions on the Cast AR system. [1:43:14]
JE
Well, right now we’re being very conservative about letting people come work over here. It is kind of cramped! Folks that are fans and friends have been helping us out here and there on art and sound and programming but until we have funding and a real office it is going to be pretty limited. [1:43:39]
CG
Gotcha. You could pay people in pinball plays right now right? [1:43:43]
JE
Exactly. [1:43:44]
CG
You get 3 quarters but you keep cycling them through the machine. Spend that however you want to. [1:43:51]
JE
I’m really excited about getting our studio up and going because this is it, we get to choose all the coolest people that we want to work with and there’s not going to be the old guard that’s going to come through and mandate things. We get to set the culture right now. [1:44:09]
CG
You’re the old guard! That’s the best part. [1:44:13]
DJ
Seniority. [1:44:18]
JE
Back when I had my computer store it was one of my favourite times in my career. I had my computer stores I had some employees working with me, this feels a whole lot like that. Family. We sometimes squabble a little bit here and there, when things get tense, but we all really like each other. We have good personalities, if I don’t say so myself! [1:44:52]
DJ
I read that George Han has a question that we have pretty much covered but I think there’s an interesting angle to it. He is curious about the ASIC. How much functionality do you decide to put into the ASIC because the FPGAs have that refuelled reprogrammable reconfigurability, so I know it’s a trade off against power and cost and everything else but with that ASIC you do lose that flexibility. How are you treating that? Are you just going to go right we’ll put these features in and that’s it, too bad can’t do anything else in the future, we’ll have to spin a new ASIC. [1:45:36]
JE
Exactly. So for the ASIC we want to add as much flexibility as possible, that’s why we have that little 6502 hanging out in there that does a bunch of stuff in the blanking period. That way we don’t hard code anything. So we try to offload any kind of low speed stuff on it. [1:45:58]
DJ
So it is actually a processor? It’s all processor-driven in there essentially? [1:46:03]
JE
Status-driven by a processor. It is actually a pixel pipeline that is doing all the detection. So that’s actually a little scary. If we design this thing and a year down the road we decide if we had only changed this one parameter … [1:46:22]
DJ
Exactly. [1:46:24]
JE
Every ASIC that you design you have to try to figure out what’s going to be completely flexible and going completely flexible usually the trade off is lower performance and what’s going to be hard coded. [1:46:40]
DJ
So you absolutely cannot do this project without a gate array ASIC? Is there no avenue to do it with some power FPGA? [1:46:53]
JE
We could do it with an FPGA but it is cost. [1:46:56]
DJ
Yeah, it is cost but it depends on how big. You can get a dollar FPGA but you can’t put much in it. [1:47:01]
CG
No, you can’t do video. [1:47:02]
JE
Yeah, that’s the unfortunate part. Unless Altera or someone wants to [hint hint] get this design win and gives us a competitive price to persuade us not to go down the route of the metalized gate array then I don’t think there’s much option to hit our price point. [1:47:22]
We could add $100. [1:47:25]
DJ
So it’s just price? [1:47:26]
JE
Yeah, we could add $100 retail. [1:47:28]
CG
I’ve never heard of a win like that. That would be a crazy win for an FPGA. I’ve never heard anything like that. Maybe volume. [1:47:36]
JE
I tried. [1:47:38]
DJ
Maybe they can sponsor it. It could become the Altera Cast AR glasses. [1:47:44]
CG
No way man. [1:47:48]
JE
I tried that with the toys. We were doing all these metalized gate arrays and I went to Altera and Zylinx and said hey you have hard copy for these really big FPGAs, your $1,000 FPGAs down to like $100 hard copy version of it. Would you ever consider doing like a cyclone hard copy? Go from $15 down to a buck? They pretty much just said get out of here kid. [1:48:17]
DJ
Yeah, right you’re wasting our time. Yeah. That’s chump change. [1:48:20]
JE
Unless something’s changed, they’re not interested. [1:48:22]
CG
They’re making good money. [1:48:24]
JE
That’s where Atmel and EASIC and some of these other companies step in and make it up on volume. It seems pretty lucrative to me, they made quite a revenue off of us on toys. They are making money on the masks and making money on the per part. [1:48:46]
CG
That’s interesting business, I think we could probably talk to you about that just for another 5 hours just cos … [1:48:54]
JE
I really wish there was something in between.. as a designer I would love to have something between metalized gate arrays and FPGA, something that would bridge the gap. I could foresee getting grid of the $20 FPGA and putting a $8 part in there. [1:49:11]
CG
Yeah. Well they are starting to do that too. [1:49:13]
DJ
So what is your price target for your ASIC? Can you get away with a $20 part or does it have to be sub $10? [1:49:43]
JE
We are looking for less than $5 on the ASIC. [1:49:45]
DJ
Wow, OK. Yeah, that’s pretty restrictive, isn’t it? Especially at that sort of volume. [1:49:50]
JE
So we are going to eliminate $30-40 worth of electronics on the headset just by doing this. Which will be huge as far as getting the cost down. [1:50:01]
CG
Yeah. [1:50:04]
DJ
So the electronics is a large cost component of the final product? It’s not the screen, it’s not the plastics to get the moulded glasses, it’s not the Pico projectors? It all adds up obviously. [1:50:21]
JE
Yeah nickels and dimes. By far the most expensive things in the whole design is the micro displays. We are still doing the dance on those. [1:50:32]
Cg
We’ll sell a million … maybe. We’d like to! (Over 10 years!) [1:50:40]
JE
If you give us the right price now we can sell a million, if you give us the wrong price, no. [1:50:54]
CG
Exactly. [1:50:46]
DJ
Engineers have a hard time lying when it comes to stuff like that to vendors, don’t we? We are just too honest for our own bloody good. [1:50:52]
JE
Yeah! I’m always in trouble because of that. [1:50:54]
CG
You need to put on a sales person. [1:50:55]
JE
I’m a very candid person and I’m sure Rick’s gonna listen to this podcast and be, like, you said what to them? You’re talking about our actual costs? [1:51:04]
CG
We’re sorry Rick! [1:51:05]
JE
Oh my God! [1:51:08]
CG
But she’s the President, she’s allowed to! You said you were President right? [1:51:11]
JE
Madam President! [1:51:12]
DJ
Any experienced hardware person can guess your costs anyway to within a reasonable margin. [1:51:18]
JE
Yeah, those that have been around the block a few times. [1:51:20]
DJ
It’s not proprietary. [1:51:22]
JE
If we’re going to do sub $200 you can guess exactly what the glasses … [1:51:26]
DJ
Yeah, I can guess that you need a bus $10 processor. It’s not hard. [1:51:31]
CG
Plus Dave will do a tear down anyways once he gets one. [1:51:35]
JE
There’s just one blob of epoxy under here! Damn you Jeri! [1:51:40]
DJ
It’s not as exciting!
What about tooling for glasses and stuff like that, for the plastic? How are you going to do the 10,000 for the Kickstarter?
CG
Things have gotten cheaper lately man. [1:51:56]
Je
Yeah, so we think we’ve got it figured out what we’re going to do as far as the sub assembly. It needs to be dimensionally stable, micro displays versus the camera. So there’ll be a bit of a floating assembly. The glasses themselves will be kind of decoupled from that. You can’t be bending the relationship. [1:52:22]
DJ
It’s that critical due to the nature of the tracking? [1:52:27]
JE
Yeah, so you can’t have the projector … [1:52:31]
DJ
You can’t have the plastic expand when you put it on your head and it heats up? [1:52:36]
JE
We can tolerate a bit but we can’t tolerate someone putting it over the top of the wire snow cap or something and bending the arms out and having the 2 projectors angle in or something. [1:52:49]
DJ
Ah, got it. Yeah. [1:52:50]
JE
That’s some of the challenges we have to work through. [1:52:54]
DJ
Is there any self-calibration? The first time you use it do you calibrate? Or is it factory-calibrated once and that’s it? Do they even need calibration? Or is it so dimensionally stable that you don’t need to? [1:53:08]
JE
There is a calibration process that we go through here but that’s because we hot glue all of them together so … [1:53:16]
DJ
Exactly. But in the final production do you envisage that there’s going to be a calibration step in either manufacturing or by the user? [1:53:24]
JE
No, we don’t expect that to be the case. We expect to manufacture in tolerance and that tolerance should be good enough. You don’t have to be accurate within 1 pixel accuracy with your magic wand that you are poking at things, but if you get off by 10 pixels that’s pretty bad, you notice that. [1:53:45]
As far as tooling, I imagine what we are going to do is soft tooling. We will do aluminium inserts for the plastics and since if we go the Kickstarter route it is going to be pretty low volume so we can just shoot out of an aluminium tool and it will wear out pretty quick but … [1:54:04]
CG
Then you cut steel later. And that’s when the fun begins. [1:54:09]
DJ
Are you going to have to bring on an industrial designer to do all the 3D caddy? [1:54:17]
JE
Absolutely. That’s one area that we don’ t have a mechanical engineer yet. Most of the work has been left over from Valve. Some of the frames and stuff came from our mechanical engineer who was also let go at the same time. [1:54:30]
DJ
Well just steal your mechanical engineer from Valve! [1:54:33]
JE
He was let go also unfortunately, kind of a bummer, he went off and got another job before we got our feet under us again. [1:43:44]
DJ
Right. Is there now a clause that you can’t – this often happens when you leave a company there’s a no poaching clause that they make you sign, or it is in your original agreement. [1:54:54]
JE
Yeah, I didn’t sign anything. [1:54:56]
CG
That doesn’t work in some states, though, California that doesn’t work. So they can’t be enforced, apparently. I’ve been told.
That’s fun though, doing that mechanical stuff. You’ve done mechanical stuff before Jeri, right? [1:55:12]
JE
Yeah, I have a good idea of it, I’ll be able to talk to our mechanical engineer and be able to relay what I’m imagining. [1:55:23]
DJ
But not do the grunt work?! [1:55:24]
JE
Yeah. It is better to have someone run the tool that actually knows it! So Terra, our graphics person and animator, also has a background in industrial design, which is quite different than mechanical design. So she is actually working on concepts of what the glasses might look like and then she’ll work closely with the person who comes on board to do the engineering and choice of materials. It’s going to take a little bit of research to figure out what the right plastics should be. Is it going to be a liquid crystal polymer? Is it going to be some kind of nylon? It has to be rigid enough that when some kid bends the arms out or something … [1:56:04]
CG
Yeah, polycarbonate or something? [1:56:05]
DJ
And herein lies the problem. You can’t get that person unless you get funding and you can’t get funding unless you do your Kickstarter campaign, unless you get funding from somewhere else, and then in your Kickstarter campaign you have to put a deadline to when you’re going to deliver this stuff, so you haven’t even made those decisions yet. That’s why 80% of Kickstarter campaigns are late. [1:56:31]
JE
Yeah, you get going and find out it’s difficult. It takes a long time. We hope that we can have a lot of our team lined up. As soon as we get Kickstarter funding we’re going to have to hit the ground running and start recruiting like mad, because people aren’t going to want to wait a long time for these glasses so we’re going to have to be aggressive and come up with some schedule that people will be happy with. So that means we’ve got to get people working on this immediately after we get funding. [1:57:06]
DJ
That’s right. But ultimately, unfortunately for a complex hardware project like this you essentially have to sell a promise, like you’ve got your prototype and everything else but there’s a lot of steps to actually deliver a final product. [1:57:22]
JE
Well luckily this isn’t my first time to the rodeo so we can at least be close to s ship date or if not hit it right on. Rick has a background in shipping games, I have a background in shipping consumer products and designing them, so within a few weeks we should be able to. within a few weeks of our deadline we believe we can hit it. [1:57:52]
CG
Plus if you don’t, what is the President going to fire you or something? [1:57:57]
JE
That’s right. I don’t want to be in the situation where I’m months and months overdue. I saw some Kickstarters and how upset people get when things are late. [1:58:09]
CG
Yes, very. It is better to be realistic. [1:58:12]
DJ
And if you don’t keep them constantly updated as well, then they get nervous and all the rumors start that you’ve done a runner! [1:58:21]
Je
I hope, I think everyone else is on board around here, that we are going to be very open about what’s going on. Because it is to our benefit. Here it is, this is the fact, this is what’s going on, these are our costs. [1:58:38]
CG
And it will be educational too. [1:58:39]
DJ
I don’t know why everyone doesn’t, why everyone who runs a Kickstarer campaign doesn’t do that, unless you’re actually running a con. Why wouldn’t you be 100% open all the time? I don’t understand that. If you know you’re not going to be able to hit your target, just say so. [1:58:56]
CG
Some of it could be because you don’t know yourself. If you don’t know what’s going to happen next. Jeri has the experience with hardware and Rick has experience with software but if you’re just kind of grasping at straws, oh I guess we’ll ship it next. No, you’ll design plastics next. That kind of thing. [1:59:14]
JE
Yeah, I don’t envy some of these peopled that are struggling with that for the first time. [1:59:21]
DJ
Because it is too easy to take people’s money with an idea. You sell an idea on Kickstarter and you take people’s money and you go oo OK I’ll just get somebody to do it all for me and it all falls in a heap when you don’t know what you’re doing.
Fortunately you guys do. [1:59:47]
JE
YES! And we’re excited. I can’t wait until you guys actually get to put the glasses on. [1:59:56]
DJ
Oh, you’re making a trip to Australia are you?! [1:59:58]
JE
Maybe! There’s a conference, I can’t remember the name of it but they were pestering me to come out. I don’t know if I will actually do it. [2:00:10]
DJ
Well if you can get a first class ticket out of them! It’s only a 15-hr flight. Lots of time to write code! [2:00:18]
JE
Yeah, I’ll have my FPGA sitting there on the little table. [2:00:21]
CG
Yeah, your programmer on your lap. [2:00:23]
DJ
And good luck getting that through airport security. Bringing all this rough and ready hardware on to the plane, all this hacked together improvised electronics. [2:00:32]
JE
You guys would like this story. It was back when I was doing a toy design, before they had all these power outlets on the plane, so you didn’t get power on the plane. I was doing this cross-country flight that was going to be 5 hours. I HAD to get some of this stuff done. So I went out and got a battery backup UPS and it has a little beeper speaker in there. I open it up and crunch the speak er out so it wouldn’t be annoying. I went through airport security with this UPS in my bag. And they stopped me, of course, and they’re like … [2:01:14]
CG
Because it looks like a bomb, right? It looks like a chemical chamber. [2:01:16]
JE
Right! They look at this thing, it’s weighs like 10 pounds, with a battery. They’re like we can’t X-ray through something in your bag, can we take a look at your bag. They pull this thing out and they’re like what’s this. I said that’s just a surge protector. They’re like, it’s warm. It was plugged in before I came here. They’re like OK. [2:01;42]
CG
Yeah, you know designers these days, they can’t do anything right. [2:01:44]
JE
So I get to my gate, I plug the UPS in and to get this thing going before I got on the plane you couldn’t just start the thing without it being plugged in so I had to plug it into an outlet put the power switch on, tape the power switch so it couldn’t get bumped and then pull the plug. And I ran off this UPS for like 2 hours so I got an additional 2 hours plus what my laptop had. What do you think, I’m as genius or what? [2:02:16]
CG
Genius because you got away with it! That’s how it works. That’s really good. [2:02:23]
DJ
Was this pre or post 9/11? [2:02:24]
JE
Post. [2:02:27]
DJ
Right, I’m surprised then. [2:02:25]
CG
Hey man when you need power you need power! That was very inventive. [2:02:36]
JE
Another post-9/11 thing that I did that was probably not very smart is I had an old cell phone, a flip phone. And somehow I managed to plug the wrong charger into it and blew up the charging circuit. So I put 2 alligator clips soldered to the battery and drilled a hole through the case and I would put it onto my bench supply and put a little charge on it. [2:02:58]
CG
Yeah, a trickle charge. [2:02:49]
JE
Yeah, trickle charge my lithium battery in the thing. So I went through security with this thing and I went through a couple of times and they never really looked at it but this one time they like saw the alligator clips and they freaked! They were like what is this? And I had to dismantle it for them. I said it’s really just a cell phone, it’s just hooked to the battery. I’m an electrical engineer, trust me! But they let me go. You just have to have conviction. [2:03:30]
Cg
Exactly, confidence. It’s all in the swagger. [2:03:34]
DJ
This is now our official longest – way longest – episode ever. We blew 2 hours. [2:03:46]
JE
Ouch, I’m sorry about that guys. [2:03:47]
DJ
That means 2 hours of work you didn’t get done! [2:03:48]
JE
Oh God, I gotta get out of here. We’ve got a Kickstarter to do. [2:03:54]
CG
Well you have the site now right? [2:02:03:58]
JE
Technicalillusions.com and we’re going to do blogs there and YouTube videos. [2:04:09]
DJ
Any live feeds? [2:04:11]
JE
That would be interesting haven’t done a live feed in a long time. [2:04:15]
CG
Old school, you get the chat to speech thing going on again. [2:04:19]
DJ
With my computer I had voice jumping. It’s awesome. [2:04:25]
JE
I miss those days. [2:04:27]
DJ
Sorry that’s an in joke for anyone who has seen Jeri’s old live shows. [2:04:34]
JE
We had sound bits from Dave and then the IRC chat room could choose words and phrases to say. Utter rubbish! [2:04:46]
CG
Yep. [2:04:50]
JE
Well before we go I feel like I might have been a little bit too hard on Valve. I should at least say that I’m disappointed that I’m not at Valve but a lot of my friends are there and I wish them the best of luck. If they are listening I love you guys, can’t wait to see what you come out with. [2:05:11]
CG
Yeah. It’s great that they gave you the technology, allowed you to keep the prototypes and everything. [2:05:20]
JE
Yes, we walked in a week later after getting a verbal agreement we walked out with the contents of our lab. They just let us take everything. [2:05:29]
CG
Wow, except the equipment! [2:05:30]
JE
Yeah, I couldn’t keep my $30,000 scope but now I’m back to , it’s really terrible I’m working with this old 100 megahertz scope that everything looks like DC. I’m working on these giga hertz serializers and I don’t even bother pulling the scope out, it would be just like a DC bias. [2:05:53]
CG
Yeah, I’ll just check that one bit to see if it fired. [2:05:56]
DJ
Terrific. [2:06:02
CG
Well thanks for being on the show Jeri, we’ll look forward to seeing what’s next.
JE
Well, when we get closer, once we get the … [2:06:09]
CG
We’ll throw a guest your way so you can hire them. [2:06:16]
JE
Yeah, there we go! [2:06:17]
CG
We will be the recruiting arm of Technical Illusions. [2:06:22]
DJ
Awesome, thanks Jeri. It’s great. I’m sure a lot of people are going to really appreciate this episode.
JE
Thanks guys. [2:06:34]
CG
Alright, we’ll talk to you soon. [2:06:36]
DJ
Now get back to work [whip sound] [2:06:37]

The post #147 – Transcript – Absorptive Augmented Actuality first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

(TC 0:00:00)
INTRODUCTION: Welcome to The Amp Hour, I’m Dave Jones from the EEVBlog. And I’m Chris Gammell of Chris Gammell’s Analog Life. And this is Bob Davidson of the Ambient Sensors.
Dave: Hey, Bob, thanks for joining us.
Bob: Hi
Dave: Is it Bob or Robert? It’s Bob, right?
Bob: I go by Bob, yeah.
Dave: Yeah, everyone does, right? All Roberts do, don’t they?
Bob: Well, I’m…
Dave: Especially here in Australia.
Bob: If I hear Robert, I think I’m in trouble.
[laughter]
Dave: Robert J. Davidson, come here immediately.
Bob: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly.
Dave: Very, yeah, Bob is like, the stereotypical name…
Chris: I hear he’s your uncle, Dave.
Dave: He’s my uncle, yeah. Bob’s my uncle here in Australia. Bob literally is my uncle. I do have an [inaudible 00:01:12], that’s how Australian I am, yeah.
Chris: That’s good, nice.
Dave: So tell us about yourself, Bob.
Bob: Okay, well…
Dave: Tell us your life story.
Bob: Oh gosh!
Chris: [Anger! 00:01:23]
Dave: Putting you on the spot.
Bob: How long do you have?
Dave: Well my parents met at a…
Bob: Yeah, exactly!
Chris: I was just a glitter in my father’s eye.
Bob: Well I…
Dave: Well start, sorry, start out where you’re working at the moment and what you do, and then go back on how you got started in electronics because everyone wants to know that.
Bob: Sure. Okay, well, I have a small consulting and product development company here called Ambient Sensors, it’s in Boise, Idaho, and do custom electronic design for all sorts of people. One of the projects that we’ve been working on recently is a hit detector for football that measures how hard football players get hit and then alerts them if they should be checked, which…
Dave: Checked? What do you mean? Like a profession?
Bob: It measures the probability of a concussion and it alerts them if there’s a 50% chance of a concussion.
Dave: Oh, right, I got you. I thought you were talking about the ball; now, you’re talking about the…
Bob: No, no, no.
Dave: Right. Body sensors!
Bob: It measures how hard they get hit in the head. I was working with the people at the injury biomechanics lab at Wayne State University and another group up in Ottawa called Biokinetics and they built this tester for measuring…
Dave: Banging heads!
Bob: Yeah, exactly!
Dave: What a great rig to build.
Bob: Yeah. Well they got it by studying videos of guys banging heads and so the thing has realistic velocities and forces. To give you a feel for what it’s like, it’s really violent. If Dave put a football helmet on and then let Chris take a baseball bat…
Chris: Can we hook this up because this…
Dave: Which he’s been dreaming of doing for years.
Chris: Yeah, I was going to say, is this a possibility?
Bob: No, it’s really awesome. The pro players are getting peak G-forces of 120Gs over…
Dave: Holy crap!
Bob: … impulses that are about 15 milliseconds wide.
Dave: Well yeah, that’s not many Gs. If you drop something on a hard surface of a bench, you can get thousands of Gs, right there. I mean G is just deceleration at given distance.
Bob: Right, so then when it’s connected to a head rigidly so [inaudible 00:03:32] then… that’s how you have to calculate the energy and the impulse and it gets pretty substantial.
Chris: Yeah.
Dave: Yeah, which is just basically the area under the curve is the energy of the impulse.
Bob: Exactly! Yeah. There is something called the head injury criteria that actually uses that. It’s an experimental curve that was developed, actually, originally for the automobile crash business then it’s been extended into this.
Dave: So this is like a standard curve, is it, a standard impact curve?
Dave: Yeah, that’s recognized by the insurance industry in an auto crash. So this thing has a little three-axis analog device, this accelerometer and NXP microcontroller that does all the management of that.
Dave: How do you find those MEMS accelerometers because I’ve never used those for shock and vibration testing? I’ve always used a real “accelerometer” from ICP or from Brüel & Kjaer or someone like that.
Bob: Right. You mean in terms of how close they agree?
Dave: Like its response, its linearity, its calibration, all that sort of stuff. Are those things any good?
Bob: They’re awesome! Actually, I’ve been doing testing here with what we call a drop tester, which has a laboratory-grade accelerometer…
Dave: They’re the ones I’ve used, yeah, the lab-grade ones, and they come with cal certificate and a response curve and the whole, you know.
Bob: Oh yeah and fancy amplifiers and labVIEW and all the rest of it. Then we drop it onto a pad that has a certain durometer that gives the kind of impulse that we want. I get very good fits to the data, like 0.998 for a goodness of fit and things like that when I’ve plotted one against the other, so actually it’s very good.
Dave: Awesome! Okay. I didn’t think they were that good. I thought they’re okay for getting a tilt on your mobile phone, but I’ve always wondered how good they are for actually, you know, linear calibration.
Bob: These go up to 200Gs, so although they’re similar technology, they’re not the same as what’s in the mobile phone. The use case before this one for these accelerometers is setting off air bags in cars, and that grade of accelerometer is pretty reliable of course and so.
Dave: It’d have to be, yeah, expensive.
Bob: Good one to use.
Dave: So all you pussies wearing helmets in your sports over there because we don’t wear helmets here in our football.
Bob: Right, exactly.
Chris: Look how that turned out!
Dave: Is it just in the helmet or does it [show them 00:06:52] on the body and stuff like that?
Bob: In this case, it goes in the chin cub. The part that holds the helmet on to the… they wear them very tight and it’s very rigid. The overall combination of chin cub, helmet and skull forms a pretty rigid body, so we do a lot of correlation work. One of the things we have to take into account is the angle of the hit and so we can compensate for…
Dave: I was going to say, can you determine the angle of the hit?
Bob: Yeah I can. Because of the initial acceleration, I can work it out.
Dave: Oh right, yeah.
Chris: Do you actually beam it over to the sidelines or something or is it data logging so that once they are hit, they just pull it off and see?
Bob: The other side of this is that we wanted to make one that was affordable at the high school level because that group of players is probably the least observed and most vulnerable.
Chris: The most career ahead of them, hopefully.
Bob: Hopefully! The system that I’ve been building only stores the data locally and uses a USB connector to download it. We looked at wireless and that could be an option later but the wireless is just not reliable enough. What we do right now is we, at least for the low cost stuff over an area the size of a football field with all the other interference and things around them, so what we do is we have a very bright LED and when the player gets hit, where there’s a 50% chance of a concussion based on that curve I mentioned earlier, it flashes bright red and they’re supposed to go off and get checked to see if they actually did suffer a concussion.
Chris: At least change the helmet out.
Dave: I can see this becoming like a crowd thing. Like if it pulses bright red, the crown erupt, whoah, hit him again!
Bob: One of the worries actually is that people start trying to…
Chris: Right. Dave’s [inaudible 00:09:19] [badge 00:09:20].
Dave: Yeah, they would hurt each other more, right, if they see…
Bob: Like in the carnival where you hit the hammer down and the thing starts ringing.
Dave: Oh boy!
Bob: I am actually on a national committee that’s setting standards for this because there will be, eventually, standards for how many hits… one of the issues is not so much the concussions, although those are bad enough, but there’s a whole spectrum of impacts below that level. They’re starting find accumulative damage and so they want to set, although the standards (00:10:00) haven’t been established yet, how many…
Dave: How many concussions you can sustain per game.
Bob: Exactly!
Dave: Which is crazy because if you ask any neurologist, they will say one concussion is too many. Do not even get one. Yeah, I guess well these sports have to exist, right?
Bob: The protocol now if you do get a concussion is you’re supposed to rest it for… you’re not even supposed to play video games or do anything, even think.
Dave: What?
Bob: Well because they want to cut down the blood flow. It’s micro-tears in the brain tissue. Take up cross-country running or something.
[laughter]
Chris: Suddenly the average mass of a cross-country team goes up by a tenth of a football player.
Bob: Yeah.
Dave: So that’s what you’re currently working on with your own company, Ambient Sensors?
Bob: That’s one of them. I’m doing some weigh-scale work and other different things that come along.
Dave: Is this just a one-man band company – is this just you?
Bob: Actually I have myself and a couple of other people now. I didn’t really mean to have a company.
Dave: God damn it! I didn’t want to run a damn company!
Bob: I had done a start-up before and then I was working at the local university but with the cutbacks and things that job went away, so I just started this company to pay rent.
Dave: Oh okay, so you’re not currently working at the uni, you’re not a professor at the university?
Bob: No, I teach still for them. I just don’t get paid very much.
Dave: Right, okay.
Bob: Like this semester I’m teach engineering statistics.
Dave: Oh, yeah, right, fun stuff!
Bob: They don’t want to spoil the reputations of any of the other faculties on campus so they have me for…
Chris: The whipping boy of teachers now, right.
Dave: How does that work? You get paid less, so you’re, what, considered a temporary teacher is that what the…?
Bob: Well they call it adjunct faculty.
Dave: Ah right, okay.
Bob: Adjunct professor.
Dave: Ah right, adjunct, right. I’ve heard that term, I never really knew what it meant.
Bob: It means you don’t get paid very much. You don’t have tenure.
Dave: Right, okay.
Bob: I do it out of a community sense, and it also keeps me involved with the university and all that sort of stuff.
Chris: So this is University of Idaho?
Bob: It’s called Boise State University.
Chris: Oh Boise State, okay.
Dave: Why Idaho? Were you born and raised Idaho or did you move there for some reason?
Bob: Idaho is, like so many important things in your life, totally by accident.
Dave: Do tell.
Bob: In my first incarnation as a graduate student I was at Johns Hopkin working in X-Ray astronomy and we had an experiment that we flew on an air force satellite out of Vandenberg. I had gone to school as an undergraduate up at Washington State University and so I came out West for the satellite launch. I went up to visit my friends at Washington State, and actually Dave will relate to this, I was visiting with my friend and his kid needed to have his diaper changed. So while he was back changing the diaper the phone rings so he asked me to answer the phone. Well it was another friend of mine that was working down here. HP had just opened up a division, the disk memory division down here and they were looking for people to staff it up. The reason why it’s in Boise is because Hewlett & Packard used to like to ski quite a bit up in Sun Valley.
Dave: That’s right, yeah.
Bob: They even had a ranch up there. The guy who was the CEO at the time, John Young, was from Nampa, which is a small town close by. So there’s no other good explanation except that just pure accident.
Chris: Serendipity.
Bob: Yeah. I did get in early days in the disk drive business, although disk drives back then were…
Dave: Manly disk drives they were; they were the maaaaan!
Bob: One of ours actually used a washing machine motor.
[laughter]
Bob: But we also could sell them for amazing amounts of money. We had a 400 Mb drive; I think it was about $25,000 piece of equipment back then. I graduated from college in ’77, my Bachelor’s degree.
Dave: That was before you were born, Chris.
Bob: Yeah, I know.
Chris: Yeah.
Bob: I had my first license as a Ham radio operator in 1967, when I was like 12…
Dave: Yes, awesome!
Bob: Okay.
Dave: Okay that was before I was born.
Bob: That was the timeline. Just before that, it was the dinosaurs, right?
Dave: Right, yeah. And well according to some states in the US, yeah.
Bob: Exactly! So anyway – I forgot what I was talking…
Chris: You said you graduated in ’77 that was, I think, where you started.
Bob: So disk drives and microcontrollers and that kind of stuff were only available at big corporations, in computers basically. PCs came out in early ’80s. What amazes me at this point is how much access to technology there is. I just bought one of the new LPC-Link 2s, their new debugger and it’s, like, 20 bucks.
Dave: I know it’s crazy.
Chris: Versus [list 00:16:08] prices, right.
Bob: You can run Segger JTAG on it or the NXG, Red Probe and all this other stuff.
Dave: Well that’s the thing. People don’t realize, before about 1990 doing your own microcontroller stuff at home was practically unheard of.
Bob: Yeah.
Dave: You just couldn’t afford the tools.
Bob: It was impossible really.
Dave: Yeah, it was impossible.
Chris: Well I remember Jack Ganssle said he built his whole first business on doing an in-circuit emulator. They had this entire industry on its own.
Bob: Now the tools have just got so amazing too, the software tools to do the development. The same thing, okay – I feel so silly – when I first did PC boards at HP, we actually used tape and paper and then took a picture of it.
Dave: Yeah, been there done that. Chris hasn’t!
Chris: No, no.
Bob: Things like EAGLE are just amazing to me as well.
Chris: Yeah they had finger tips and everything, right, the CAD.
Bob: The other thing that’s been, I think, very exciting is the kind of things like Dave’s doing this video and other people, that there’s community around the Open Source and Jerry’s stuff. You can go out on the web now and learn so much if you want to. So being a autodidact is a much easier thing now than it used to be.
Chris: Yeah, let’s troop to the library. Knock on their doors, begging to sit in the library for a little while.
Bob: Well what’s amazing is also how willing people are to help. We were talking earlier about the Bluetooth low energy. I hadn’t done anything with Bluetooth low energy and I had a project come up that really needed it and started looking around. There’s this Jeff Rowberg I know at Open Source hardware site, and so I got in touch with him and he just turned out to be a ton of help in getting the Bluegiga BLE112 out and running. He even was able to provide EAGLE footprints. So just being able to do stuff these days is amazing. I think it’s the synergy of all the people working together that make it so interesting.
Dave: That used to happen before the communications’ revolution except you used to send letters or you’d call people up on the phone. I’d get letters in the mail; can you help me with this? So I’d spend all day writing a reply letter and lick a stamp and send it back and that’s how you communicated and shared information.
Bob: I’ve got some really funny ones. My dad saved some of mine from when I was a kid, writing off to these big companies asking for parts. I built a phase lock LUKE-based radio tele-type demodulator back in about 1970 and it was based on one of these brand new LM565s I think it was or 567. It replaced a refrigerator-sized piece of hardware at NASA, was one of the things they claimed at the time, which it probably did. I ordered one and the company thought I was some other big company or something, anyway it showed up on Christmas Eve by special delivery and all this stuff and I just wanted to work on it over the… and I built a board. We had – I forget why we had this – our school had (00:20:00) a, I think it was for exposing printing plates or something, UV lights…
Chris: Like a light box?
Bob: Yeah, light box, and so I was able to take it to school and spray on the resist and then expose it through a negative that I got made.
Chris: Man!
Dave: Those were the days.
Chris: [inaudible 00:20:17] look on the Internet, right?
Bob: Now I just send off Gerber files and the boards come back in a few days.
Dave: Exactly. [inaudible 00:20:26] of the world.
Bob: It is. It’s hard to decide where to divide your time too because you could do all these things still but it doesn’t seem worthwhile in some ways.
Dave: Tell us about it. It’s the bane of every engineer’s existence these days, isn’t it?
Bob: Yeah.
Dave: There’s just too much stuff to work on and just, you know, too much stuff cool stuff to play with and not enough time, I know.
Chris: Right.
Bob: I know.
Dave: It’s crazy.
Chris: I’ve just cut down on sleeping. Have you guys tried that?
Dave: I’m trying that but, you know, wife doesn’t get happy.
Bob: I’ve been reading a lot recently that you really should get eight hours of sleep to be creative.
Chris: Yeah, no, I do [inaudible 00:21:03].
Dave: Well, no, some of my best stuff has been done with my eyes practically shut.
Bob: Oh really?
Dave: Yeah.
Chris: That was under the gun probably too, right, Dave. It’s not like…
Dave: Of course, yeah, having that timeline, yeah, time…
Chris: I think that was more the key there.
Dave: Possibly.
Bob: Yeah. That’s one of my biggest motivators.
Chris: I just sit there like in a stupefied sleepless haze and I just click stuff at that point but I still want to be doing it.
Dave: So tell us about this start-up you did because we always love hearing start-up stories.
Bob: Well most of the start-up stuff you read, you know, the Facebook stuff is all business porn, pretty much. It was a fun project but it nearly ruined my financially.
Dave: Ooh, do tell; people love to hear these things.
Chris: You take the good, you take the bad.
Dave: Are you willing to lose all your money? Yeah.
Bob: You’ve got to be willing to do that. A start up should really be looked at as business hypothesis that you’re going to test out and you should be dispassionate about it. At the point where you’ve proven that it’s not, you should stop at some point. You know those inspirational posters that businesses like to put up?
Chris: Like with the cat hanging on by its…
Dave: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Bob: The one with the ship anybody can sail on. The one I always liked was winners never quit and quitters never win. Anyway, never mind, I forget how that went.
Dave: yeah, I know.
Chris: Sounds like the posters worked.
Bob: Yeah. I learned a lot from it, I have to say that. I learned a lot. The idea was consumer product and getting traction and the resources you need to do a consumer product is really difficult.
Dave: That’s tough, yeah.
Bob: This is back in 2001/2002… you can also be too early into things.
Dave: Like pre-kick starter.
Bob: Yeah, pre-kick starter. So we had, essentially, a media center PC that was controllable through a wireless pad, but it was one of those early Windows CE pads and it was pretty awesome. We tried to differentiate it from just a big remote control by some of the things it could do. One of the things it could do is really simplify working with media that was on the Internet. One of the other things it could do though was display video from security cameras. The idea was that maybe you’d be watching the movie but then the doorbell would ring and you decided you needed to answer the door or something like that, or if you had a swimming pool and you wanted to monitor it. The security part of it is what got traction so we pivoted at one point, when we weren’t really making many sales on the entertainment side, into security and then sold the company to a small publicly traded company up in Canada. Then the guys that bought it tried to cram down all the early investors, including all the people that invested with me and my own self, and it got… they actually succeeded in pulling a lot of the capital out and having the stock… because I thought when we sold it to a publicly traded company that that would provide liquidity for the investors, which is what you’re always looking for.
Dave: Yeah, yeah, of course.
Bob: As part of the sale there was a period of time where they couldn’t sell and in that time they…
Dave: Ah, they stripped it.
Bob: Yeah, they did.
Dave: Bastards!
Bob: Anyway we had to get lawyers and it was a mess.
Dave: Ahh, yeah, right.
Chris: It was not fun anymore.
Bob: No. Well I learned a lot.
Dave: That’s what everyone says, yeah.
Bob: It wasn’t one of these deals where you work for 18 months and sell it for $1 billion to Facebook.
Dave: That’s never happened.
Bob: Well, Instagram.
Chris: Yeah, right.
Dave: Well, yeah, exactly. Out of how many start-ups, millions, there’s a dozen success stories. Nobody ever talks about the failures; that’s the problem. No, not failures but the non-success stories.
Bob: If you look at it as a hypothesis, then either a positive or a negative outcome is a good outcome because you’ve driven it to a resolution. The problem is if you get so enamored with your product that you don’t quit when you really should.
Dave: Right, yes.
Bob: It was a close failure.
Dave: Missed it by that much.
[laughter]
Bob: One of the other things I learned was to do something, or to have at least some way to have an income early on. This other product we worked for a year on it before we started trying to sell any. It’s better to do something, even when you’re first starting out that doesn’t have such… unless you have somebody with really deep pockets to back it. So the current company right now, I have some projects in the background that are sort of longer term. What I’m doing right now is more product development for other people. The problem with that is it doesn’t scale very well because you’ve either got to charge more…
Chris: Only so many hours to sell the data.
Bob: Or work longer.
Dave: You’re basically selling your hourly rate; you’re charging your hourly rate and you’re a gun for hire.
Bob: Exactly!
Dave: So there’s no big pay off at the end. You just get continuous employment and you can eat. Congratulations!
Bob: The way we’re using it is doing some product development on the side and to try to be strategic about the projects that we take on. For example, this Bluetooth low energy project gets us involved and learning a technology so that learning becomes an asset of the company.
Chris: Yeah.
Dave: Right, smart.
Chris: It is smart.
Bob: Hopefully it turns out…
Dave: You’re interested in this low energy stuff, Chris.
Chris: I am, yeah. You guys are using the 2540 chips.
Bob: Bluegiga is the company in Finland. What they’ve done is put some nice… well they sell these modules first of all, which are FCC-approved so you don’t have to put your equipment through the…
Chris: That’s awesome; that’s the reason to do them.
Bob: Then they also have provided a CAPI that you can compile if you have an external microcontroller with your code.
Chris: What’s it talk over? Does it just talk over some serial…?
Bob: Through the UR on the CC2540. They also have something called Bluegiga Script, which allows the module to actually… because it has an 8051 control in it, so the module itself, you can actually hook sensors directly to the module and run Bluegiga Script on it and not really have to hook up an external MC-02, so it can be a standalone.
Dave: Very nice!
Chris: That’s kinda cool.
Bob: Yeah. The other thing about Bluetooth low energy, it’s really Bluetooth in name only because it’s really the very lowest levels, like the physical layer that are Bluetooth.
Dave: Right.
Chris: Yeah, the stack on top is different, right?
Bob: It’s very different. And it’s designed for sending bursts of structured data, so if you have a thermometer or something. And it has a different way of hooking up. So if you have a sensor hooked to your Bluegiga module and then it advertises that I’ve got temperature data, so anybody that walks in the room with the application can say, oh that can attach to it.
Dave: Right. So it’s like in Windows, it’s a generic USB microphone or something. It just tells us that it…
Chris: It’s a nerd!
(00:30:00)
Dave: Right.
Bob: Yeah. There’s a thing called a general attributes’ file and packet that’s part of the advertising that tells everybody what it can do, whereas with traditional Bluetooth, you have to send a PIN back and forth and all this.
Dave: Right.
Chris: Yeah, it’s like a handshake at that point, right? [inaudible 00:30:23] traditional.
Bob: Yeah. It’s really designed for sensors and the Bluegiga script is a pretty cool way to program it because you just need XML Editor and then they provide an application that works with the TICC debugger, the same one that TI supplies when you work directly with their TCC2540. You don’t have to install IAR and all that expense associated with that to program it then.
Chris: Yeah. I see a lot of interest in that kind of stuff. I see a lot of projects online switching over to Bluetooth, finally. If you think about it too, if you think about Android devices or even iPhone devices too, there aren’t that many ways to get into the phone and that’s the de facto gateway these days, aside from going through the web.
Bob: I was reading an interesting article yesterday though about what this is doing to Apple’s ecosystem because they used to require that you joined this Mi-Fi or MFi, MEFi…
Chris: Yeah, having that Apple chip on a wire device, right, that does the translation.
Bob: Yeah. If you were designing hardware for Apple, you had to use the 32-pin connector that they’ve got that’s special and nobody else uses.
Dave: Urgh!
Chris: Terrible.
Bob: Now with the Bluetooth you can bypass all that, so yeah, that’s a good thing.
Chris: Awesome!
Bob: Bluetooth low energy’s on some of the Android devices, it’s on some of the Samsung Galaxy devices.
Chris: Yeah, on the HT-21, I think. I’ve been shopping for those. I was telling these guys before the show that I’m starting to shop for Google [iOS 00:32:13] stuff because that has Bluetooth low energy but it’s hard to find [inaudible 00:32:19] phones.
Dave: So you have to ask a specific phone with low energy support? Is it a different chip set the phone or is there just one chip set that handles low energy mode?
Bob: I guess they probably have to have a dual-mode chip but that’s pretty common. I guess that’s the main thing, but then otherwise it’s just software.
Chris: Yeah, and that’s the key thing.
Dave: A regular Bluetooth phone can’t talk to a Bluetooth low energy device?
Bob: No, no.
Dave: Okay. I’d need a new phone then.
Chris: Yeah.
Bob: Yeah. But I think it’s going to become more common. You turn phones over every couple of years anyway.
Chris: Yeah, right. I’m just a cheap ass.
Dave: Yeah, same here. I just keep cursing my phone. Instead of buying a new one, I just curse it every day.
Bob: I’ve got my Ericsson block phone.
Chris: There you go. It’s good for paper weighting and stuff like that.
Dave: Ah, love it!
Bob: Anyway [they have 00:33:21] good stuff.
Chris: What’s with the older stuff? You sent a picture out the other day on Twitter because you’re very active on Twitter, which is great and that’s…
Bob: I like to choose Acquiba.
Chris: Yeah. You sent a picture of you in a hoodie and said I was wearing hoodies before Zuckerberg was even born.
Bob: That’s true. That’s true.
Chris: What is in this picture?
Bob: Okay. What that is, is a system for measuring how the recording heads fly over the disk and it’s a Heterodyne Interferometry system. I take the single frequency laser, 632 nanometers, and split it and then frequency shift it with these things called acousto-optic modulators. Those signal generators up in the corner of the rack, those are just to drive the acousto-optic modulators at certain frequencies. What happens is when you recombine the light, you create an optical beat note and the phase shift of the beat note, which you can bring that beat note down into the 2 megahertz range if you want, or even down into hertz. In fact, you can actually slow in down just like you listen to a beat note between two tones and needs to bring the tones closer in frequency and you get that wow, wow, wow thing, you can see this all in the optics. What it does, it lets me then measure the phase by just measuring the phase of the 2 megahertz optical beat note, so I could get with the phase detector that I had, which had a tenth of a degree resolution, I could measure the [LAN 00:35:10] to over 3,600. In other words, 632 nanometers divided by 3,600, so I was getting like a tenth of a nanometer resolution in position.
Dave: Nice!
Bob: With a 500 kilohertz bandwidth, and what I would do is eliminate the whole head and disk around it and…
Chris: So this is the actual head of the arm?
Bob: The recording head. In magnetic recording, the head’s actually flying over the disk, but if the head separation changes it modulates the amplitude and affects the air rate and other things.
Chris: So it’s just a bleed over channels and stuff then or…?
Bob: Well you can have that if things get really bad, but just back then we were trying to have [raw bed 00:36:00] air rates in the neighborhood of, it seems like 10 to the minus 8 or something like that. Then we’d boost it with ECC up into the 10 to the 10th.
Dave: You’re just doing this in the lab. Usually these hard drives are vacuum sealed to keep out dust and crap.
Bob: Yeah, well it was fairly clean conditions.
Dave: Fairly clean as in you would smoke outside instead of inside [laughs].
Bob: Actually it’s funny but back then they did allow people to smoke inside. You notice the disk diameter there is about 14 inches.
Dave: Yeah, yeah, it’s huge.
Bob: The flying height at the time seemed really small but we were flying at like 19 millionth of an inch above the disk surface.
Dave: Ahh, you’d drive a truck under that.
Bob: Exactly!
Chris: You can have an earthquake and it wouldn’t touch, right.
Bob: Yeah. What we were trying to do was design the mechanical structure that held the head out there so that it wouldn’t flap in the wind. Disk drives, they get pretty warm, especially if you can get some of those 15,000 rpm drives, they get pretty hot. Most of that heat is just the air friction.
Dave: Really, right.
Bob: Very little of it’s actually the electronic heat, or the electronic heat that we think about.
Dave: Yeah. Yeah.
Bob: Designing the mechanical structure inside to deal with all that was a pretty good challenge. The disk drives were a lot of fun to work on because they had all these server systems and mechanical challenges and magnetic challenges and electronic and you know…
Dave: This is a great photo. You’ve got to see it folks. We’ll definitely post this as your feature photo for the… or would you prefer your Twitter photo. This one’s awesome.
Bob: No that one’s fine.
Dave: Excellent beard by the way!
Bob: Oh, thanks.
Dave: So is this an anti-vibration laser table?
Bob: It’s just a giant piece of granite.
Dave: That works too.
Bob: It was 4′ x 6′ x 1′ thick.
Chris: Wow!
Dave: That works as well, yeah.
Bob: Then the disk is actually on an air-bearing spindle. So the spindle’s very low vibration, very low run out.
Chris: What timeframe was this, this was 1980s, 1970s?
Bob: No it was about 1981.
Chris: ’81 okay.
Dave: What model HP scope are you using there?
Bob: Those are 1740s.
Dave: Right. There are no evil Techtronic scopes in the building?
Bob: No. It was pretty funny when people would want to get something like that. For some things they had to because that was the capability we didn’t have.
Dave: What’s this purchase order for this Techtronic’s scope? Heads will roll.
Bob: Well actually it wasn’t so much that there was… HP was an awesome place to work when I started there. Very different than the company it is now. It was 82 different divisions and each one you had a product, and each division was run as a small company. Disk Memory division was one of the largest ones, it had 300 people in it, but most divisions were 50 to 100 people and they had all the functions of a small company. The advantage of that was that they were really close to their customers. The disadvantage is that HP, looked at from 30,000 feet, the way the CEOs and MBAs look at it, it looked like a real fragmented place but it really wasn’t. Yeah, 1981 (00:40:00) very, very different times.
Dave: And Hewleys were all the rage?
Bob: Yeah. What I was going to say is Agilent now was part of HP then. The reason they broke up the company was, again an MBA thing, they broke up the company because their stock on computers had higher multipliers than the stock on the instruments. So people thought if they broke it up, then the half that was computers could run at a higher multiplier in the stock market than the instruments.
Dave: That old short-term gain chestnut.
Bob: It was, exactly.
Chris: It worked for a little while, right.
Dave: I’m sure it worked a treat.
Bob: It never worked very well at all. Every time they did a merger, two plus two equaled one and a half. It never even made it to four, much less five or six. They always convinced people that it was a good idea. A long way around but what I was going to say is, so we got these instruments for a transfer-at-cost they called it. So basically we got the instruments for paying the bill of materials on it.
Chris: Not any of the labor?
Bob: No.
Chris: Oh wow, that’s pretty good.
Dave: Yeah, it’s awesome.
Bob: So we’d trade disk drives for oscilloscopes.
Chris: Back-alley deals.
Bob: Disk drivers were worth a lot. So we had a lot of nice instruments. Hewlett and Packard would actually come around. I’ve got this old HP signal generator that was based on Bill Hewlett’s Masters work at Stanford University but…
Chris: Oh 200, right?
Bob: Yeah. I got him to autograph it. They were just around at the time looking at… and I got him to… but they were the sort of people that you could just walk up to and talk to. One of the nice things that HP did for me was they sent me back to graduate school so I got my PhD back at Carnegie Mellon while working for Hewlett Packard.
Chris: Wow, that’s awesome!
Bob: So I was one of the better paid graduate students.
Chris: You were being paid?
Bob: Yeah because the deal was they paid all my tuition books plus I had 75% of my salary while I was going to school.
Chris: Oh, my God that’s awesome!
Bob: I know. They would never do that these days.
Chris: Yeah, these days, I don’t think you’d find any company that does that.
Bob: Yeah, so I wrote Hewlett a nice thank you note after it was all over, and he wrote back and it’s just the kind of people they were.
Chris: That’s really cool.
Bob: Whereas I was in a meeting with, I think this is fair to tell, they can’t fire me anymore.
Dave: Yeah, please, do tell.
Bob: I was in a meeting where they had all the senior engineers; it was a HP internal technical conference.
Dave: Ah, so there were Hewleys as far as the eye could see.
Bob: Yeah, exactly. Actually the HP guys were more like the old Ham radio operators.
Chris: Yeah, suit and tie, skinnies on.
Bob: No, it was always a jeans and t-shirt kind of place.
Chris: Oh good.
Bob: You never saw a tie around there, and if you did, people would make fun of you. This is when Carly first came in and so if it was Hewlett & Packard because I’d been to these kind of meetings before, they would come and have breakfast – they would always have a breakfast buffet beforehand in the morning – and they’d come sit at the table and talk and find out what was going on. The way HP changed when Carly came in was, we were sitting there having breakfast and then over the PA system it says now introducing the CEO of Hewlett Packard, Carly Fiorina, and she walks out on stage with spotlights and her sycophants in the audience. Then as soon as she was done, she took a few questions from some of the shills in the audience and then she said well I got to go and walked off and never talked to an engineer. So HP in the days when I was rigging there and the apex of it – I also worked down at HP Labs in Palo Alto – was a great engineering company to work for. There are still parts of it that are good but it’s just not the same as it was. So they used to be really out buying for the engineers.
Chris: I wonder if that kind of thing is even possible these days.
Bob: There are companies…
Dave: I’m sure it is. I think it is. It’s just got to have the right attitude.
Bob: Yeah, I think so. Actually Seagate is a little bit like that, at least the part of it that I’ve been to.
Dave: It’s very common in software companies like Altium who I used to work for, that was a dream job. There was no management, no adult supervision, no meetings, no nothing; it was just do whatever you want. It was just, you know.
Bob: Actually what they used to say is work smarter not harder. And it was management by objective. They really took that seriously. So if you agreed to do something and however you could get it done, they didn’t…
Dave: Done, then that’s it exactly.
Bob: They didn’t try to tell you how to do it.
Chris: That’s good.
Dave: So if any of our listeners out there work at a company like that, please tell us. We may even have you on the show to talk about it.
Chris: Jerry did, I thought.
Dave: Well, yeah, tell they have her the arse, year, which you might hear about shortly.
Bob: I’m really curious to hear about that.
Chris: You said management by objective, which is the like the Bill and Dave thing, right, that’s what their big thing was.
Bob: Yeah.
Chris: You actually had another management consultant, and I’m sure Dave’ll start droning now that I’m bringing it up, but you had someone sit in with you that’s pretty famous as well.
Bob: Yeah, you’re talking about Clayton Christensen, who’s famous in the business management circles for his book, The Innovator’s Dilemma, which actually is a serious…
Dave: [mock sigh], sorry!
Bob: Well actually I saw it happen because what he did… I hosted him at here because he did his PhD work on studying the disk drive business and the things that he described in there I could really relate to because the things that he describes in that book really did happen in the disk drive world. Yeah, he was out when he was a PhD student and I just hosted him around because he was collecting information on disk drive companies at the time.
Chris: Yeah. That was one of the big examples and then I think he talked about backhoe companies was another big one.
Bob: Yeah, well in disk drives, they have these companies that come in and people ignore them. If it was disk drives, it was Conner. We were building these big high margin 14″ discs and Conner came in with a 5″ disk that was kind of a toy that went into PCs and the performance wasn’t any good. Nobody thought it was… another thing that used to happen back in those days were people tried to protect their hardware by having proprietary interfaces and HP tried to ride that for as long as they could but the PC…
Chris: SCSI cables came along.
Bob: Suddenly changed it, yeah.
Dave: Yeah, the standards came in.
Bob: The companies like Conner got better and became Seagate and a…
Chris: Oh is that what started Seagate, I didn’t know that.
Bob: I don’t know the exact pedigree but it’s all entangled in…
Chris: [inaudible 00:47:53].
Dave: Yeah, it’s a very incestuous web, the hard drive industry.
Bob: Yeah, it is.
Chris: You got out though.
Bob: Yeah, well I did. HP decided they couldn’t make it anymore in disk drives, and whether they could or they couldn’t is debatable, but they got out of that business.
Dave: By selling it? Was there anything to sell off in the end or had they just been totally trumped. They folded.
Bob: No, they just totally walked away from it. There was some technology. They tried to capture some of the technology but if you don’t capture the people with… giving somebody a stack of gLab notebooks doesn’t really do a lot of good.
Chris: Here, fix this.
Bob: The big companies do a lot of patenting. But the patent business for them is not so much about the IP in the patents as just the overall throw weight of who has how many patents. So the disk drive business… it’s funny because they sent me to school and within less than a year of coming back from school, they shut down the division. So I got involved in a tape project actually called, Linear Tape Open, which was a new standard that got established, and HP was one of the companies that helped to establish that.
Dave: Tape, as in magnetic tape?
Bob: Yeah, magnetic tape, which is still used quite a bit in archive. If you think about the hierarchy of archive, you have fast drives and then slower drives and then still eventually when you get back far enough, you get onto tape because the volume density, information storage density, of tape is hard to beat. You can’t underestimate the transfer rate of a station wagon loaded with tape.
Chris: The next step up from sneakernet (00:50:00) is [wagonnet 00:50:].
Bob: Yeah.
Dave: It’s the sheer surface area, right because I assume you can’t get the same density on tape as you can on hard drive just due to the physical geometries and stuff.
Bob: You can do pretty good but not quite as good.
Dave: Not quite as good but the fact is, it’s very thin tape and you can roll hundreds of thousand meters on one little spool.
Bob: Yeah. The software that manages these storage systems is pretty amazing because they can work out and figure out which data’s not being used very much and move it further down the hierarchy until eventually it winds up on tape, where… stuff that you never. And it’s all handled transparently.
Chris: This is like cloud software you’re talking about, like high level storage.
Bob: Big data center software, yeah.
Chris: Huh! Is that like the…
Bob: Well I have a friend who makes these big disk arrays now for HP and they can store a petabyte and I said oh you’re working on pedophiles.
[laughter].
Bob: They can store a petabyte of data now; it’s not a big deal. That’s not uncommon.
Chris: Man, that’s a lot of data!
Bob: Well, there’s a lot of things making data these days.
Chris: That’s true, yeah.
Dave: Me!
Bob: Yeah, the FBI’s got to store all the phone messages they’re…
Dave: And every video that I produce, yeah…
Bob: Exactly.
Dave: So they can declare me a terrorist.
Bob: Exactly. Just throw random words into your video like plutonium or something.
Dave: Yeah, yeah, White House and President, exactly, that’s how to send out red flag. Awesome! Yeah, that’s my goal.
Bob: NASA, each of those probes generates a lot of data too. I don’t know there’s a lot of places to store data, Facebook, that’s kind of embarrassing. I remember when I started out and I was at HP Labs and we were on the early ARPAnet, I just felt insulted that they’re starting to let commercial operations onto the ARPAnet.
[laughter]
Chris: This is ours. Bob, would you write the first folio, like get these people out of here.
Bob: Back on the old UUCP groups. Well it just seemed like it was, yeah, it was commercializing something that was pure.
Chris: There goes the neighborhood.
Bob: Yeah, we didn’t lock our doors back then and now I’ve got firewalls and antivirus and everything else. I totally missed the whole web thing. I just thought that was a fad.
Dave: Oh really!
Chris: Oops! These things happen, you know. You’ll get it next time.
Bob: How can you make money on that. Facebook, that’s a dumb idea.
Chris: It is kind of dumb.
Dave: There’s a lot of dumb people out there. That’s the sheer weight of dumb people.
Bob: I don’t know how they make money on Twitter but I guess they do.
Chris: I don’t think they do yet.
Dave: No, I don’t think it’s a profit-making enterprise.
Bob: You know what’s amazing to me about Twitter is it’s like a cocktail party that never stops. I get on there and [Cuba’s 00:53:36] and Tokyo and micro-builders over in Paris and Chris’s on, VK2ZAY and all those people. So there’s always something interesting. In fact I have to shut it off when I want to get any work done.
Dave: Is your Twitter name, is that your Ham call sign?
Bob: Yeah, it’s my Ham call sign.
Dave: WA7IUT?
Bob: Yeah.
Dave: Right.
Chris: I was actually talking to people… because I just got my radio finally and I’ve been trying to find the repeaters around here. So I was asking about that because I got it all cued up to the right frequency and everything, and I was just sitting there waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting and I go, what the hell’s going on here. Someone says well, you know, there’s Twitter, there’s just tons of other ways to communicate whereas before repeaters were it.
Dave: Chris just jumped on the bandwagon…
Chris: I just got to the party.
Dave: … and realized he’s the only one left.
Chris: Yeah.
Bob: It is pretty quiet I have to say…
Dave: Hello, anybody out there?
Bob: … compared to what I remember.
Chris: Yeah.
Bob: Cell phones, now out here in Idaho it serves as a real public service because there’s lots of places where cell phones don’t get.
Chris: Yeah, right but just the repeater network before, it seems like that’s what it used to be. I see a lot of call signs on Twitter, which is great because people are making these longer contacts and I think it’s actually…
Bob:/Dave: [laughs].
Chris: No, no I didn’t mean like that. I didn’t mean like that, although it is pretty funny. I meant they try for the harder stuff with their actual antennas and stuff. That’s what I really meant. Hey, this radio thing’s easy.
Bob: They get on Twitter and set up their radio contacts.
Chris: Yeah, right.
Dave: Well technically if you’re using a notebook you’re on wireless, right?
Bob: Exactly.
Dave: Unless I ping somebody in Germany.
Bob: That’s raised an interesting issue though because when I started out I had lots of help and I built a lot of electronics when I was a kid. It was made out of tubes but it was still electronics. The maker movement and all this stuff that’s being going on with the tools and things is a good thing but there’s been a period where people weren’t building a lot of hardware it seems like.
Dave: Yeah, the ’90s as a… to early 2000 was a…
Chris: A dead zone.
Dave: … a dead zone, yeah, it was.
Chris: Everybody was getting excited about computers. Bob, it’s your fault, you’ve made all these disk drives.
Dave: That was the problem back in the ’90s. That’s all people cared about was computers. Electronics as a hobby had almost vanished. It was really quite dicey there for a while. I thought the whole thing would actually vanish.
Bob: It seems to be coming back.
Dave: Well, you know, wouldn’t vanish but like all the magazines would die and then nobody would care about it on the Internet, but now, whoah, holy crap!
Bob: It’s a big change.
Dave: Love it!
Chris: It’ll be interesting to see at Hamvention too just to see if… I don’t know if they have any idea if there will be less people than old videos showed and everything…
Dave: No, there’ll just be lots of old grey beards standing around tweeting each other.
Chris: Yeah, right.
Bob: Chris mentioned it looked like Woodstock and I said, oh boy! I don’t know.
Chris: Don’t want to see naked Ham people around, no?
Bob: No, not the ones I’ve seen.
Chris: Right.
Bob: I did notice at our local Hamvention a few weeks ago, which I went to because they still stay in touch, that there was a bunch of younger people there. That’s probably a good sign.
Chris: Yeah, and Tony who we’ve had on the show before talked about microwave stuff. I think he sent me a link showing the ARRL membership is up a lot more than it used to be too.
Bob: Yeah. I like what Tony’s doing with making the microwave stuff available to people. I’m real tempted to jump into that.
Chris: Yeah. I’m just getting started on the “low frequency” stuff. High frequency for me used to be like 20 kilohertz and now it’s moving up a little bit.
Bob: That’s another interesting thing I think because high frequency digital circuitry used to be, I don’t know, 50 megahertz.
Dave: 10, 20, megahertz, yeah. You had 50, whoah, hold onto your hats folks.
Bob: And the radios now that are up in the 5 gigahertz and 10 gigahertz range that are all solid state digital things.
Chris: Crazy, like silicon, germanium, indium whatever’s in there, yttrium.
Dave: I never thought of kids building their own PCs with 4 gigahertz processors, it’s just ridiculous.
Bob: I was giving Acquiba a hard time because I just built one of those recently and I said I was going to put Linux on it so I could use VI and Arch and [GRUP 00:58:54] and stuff like that.
Chris: Yeah, well I don’t think you’ll be alone in that.
Bob: But at 3 gigahertz.
Chris: Oh right, yeah.
Bob: Actually what is amazing about PCs also now is that you can throw these virtual machines on and you can have Linux and all this stuff all in one box running at the same time.
Chris: Yeah. That’s great for troubleshooting. I’ve worked with some people too that they’ll throw an emulator on a virtual machine. It’s not quite as fast, and then you have to jiggle with the play through, the pass through, of like USB or whatever you’re debugging with. You can actually have entire ecosystems of like your compiler and everything else in a virtual machine and then you boot it back up and you have that exact same system. So that’s a nice little trick you can do too.
Bob: Yeah, I do that. Sometimes vendors will send you, I’ve got a Analog Devices A to D convertor and they sent along a little, well it’s really something based on LabVIEW and it really wanted to run in XP, (01:00:00) so I just set up an XP virtual machine and put it in there. It didn’t collide with my other LabVIEW. Yeah, so it’s a great thing.
Chris: That’s pretty cool.
Dave: Please can we not talk about PCs anymore?
Bob: Okay.
Dave: Consumer.
Chris: Yeah, consumer world. It’s still tools we use though, right. I mean it’s not like electronics is getting away from [inaudible 01:00:21]
Dave: Yeah, but that’s it; they’re just pens really.
Chris: Yeah, right. No, the thing about it is…
Bob: Well I have one on my bench but it has a bunch of debuggers and…
Chris: LT splice.
Bob: Another things that amazing is these Saleae logic analyzers that you can hook onto your PC now and do a pretty decent job of analysis with that…
Chris: Yeah, versus the old huge Agilent or HP boxes.
Bob: Yeah, or having to buy of these expensive, although you can’t really call them expensive anymore, but one of these more expensive scopes. I’ve got a Rigol scope here, the 1052, but I’m tempted to go to the new 2200…
Dave: The new 2000, yeah, very nice.
Bob: I watched your YouTube on that.
Dave: Yeah, the comparison video of those two, yeah. It’s amazing how far we’ve come in four years.
Bob: The other thing is just awesome, and I bought it even though I really didn’t have a use for it right now, which was the Rigol 815 spectrum analyzer, which for $1,500 and it comes with a tracking generator and…
Dave: Amazing bang per buck, yeah.
Bob: Well, I don’t know, a year ago, you’d probably have to spend $12,000 to get that.
Dave: Yeah, yeah, I know. Yeah, several years ago, the average person could not afford a spectrum analyzer. If you were lucky you got a second hand old boat anchor one off eBay, but apart from that, yeah.
Bob: This is a pretty decent one.
Chris: Yeah.
Dave: Yeah, it’s not too bad. It’s not going to do leading edge stuff but it’s…
Bob: But neither am I. [laughs]
Dave: Exactly because it’s phase noise is not [inaudible 01:02:07].
Bob: I’m not trying to build a cell tower here.
Chris: Right.
Dave: No, exactly. That’s right.
Chris: Can it do 6 gig? What’s the frequency?
Bob: 1.6, yeah.
Dave: No it’s only 1.5.
Bob: Yeah, 1.5. It’s good for your camera.
Chris: Yeah, very good.
Bob: Looking at the Spectrum period in my handie-talkie.
Chris: Yeah. No, that’s pretty cool. You do some Open Source hardware stuff too, is that some of the energy harvesting stuff you’ve done or what was that?
Bob: Yeah, that was one project, just trying to give back in a small way because I’ve learned so much. It’s possible to be a EE and not actually do circuits, by the way. What I did mostly for HP was model magnetic materials and do computer models of actuators and disk drives and things, and I worked for some really interesting people and that was a lot of fun but it wasn’t designing circuits or biasing transistors and stuff like that. I’m really attracted, I guess because of my personality, to the self-learning that goes on, and so watching Dave’s videos on how to do PCBs now because I found out that nobody tapes them so I had to learn.
Dave: What, you use computers for that? What?
Bob: So I had to learn a whole bunch of new skills. One of the things about openness and about Open Source hardware that I found is that you get back more than you could ever give out. So I’ve been doing this little energy harvesting thing, which is more personal interest. I’m interested in wireless sensor networks and we have one over here in a grape vineyard where we monitor the grapes and that’s a whole other story. But the energy harvesting interests me because you’ve got to be able to power the sensors out in the field, so I built this little open source project. I’ve got emails from people all over the world about it that are just interested in it and tried to help, out some of them. A lot of college students that are trying to do senior projects on energy harvesting, but I try to help them as much as I can. I went to the Open Source Summit and that’s a great thing, if for no other reason than I got to hang out with Acquiba and Kevin Townsend and Jon, the engineer, and all those people back in New York.
Chris: I’m hoping to go that one again this year. I went to the first one but didn’t…
Bob: Yeah, go to the one this fall because I think everybody that I was with said they wanted to come back this coming fall because they had such a good time.
Chris: It’s in Boston this year too.
Bob: Oh is it?
Chris: Yeah.
Bob: I didn’t know that.
Chris: Yeah, I was surprised actually because it used to be in New York, the past three years, has been in New York at the Hall of Science, which is where Maker Faire is, or at Light Beam, which is where it was the last time, right.
Bob: IBEAM, yeah.
Chris: IBEAM, sorry, yeah.
Bob: Same thing.
Chris: The people who are putting it together, they’re up in Boston so they’re moving it up, like two or three weeks and then it’s going to Boston.
Bob: Okay. Well that’s fine. Boston’s a lot of fun too.
Chris: Yeah, it’s a great town.
Bob: The only thing I don’t like about Boston is going to the Museum of Computers because the stuff all looks brand new to me. What’s this doing in a museum, it’s still perfectly good?
[laughter]
Chris: So is this like the gift shop or…
Dave: Where’s the museum?
Bob: Actually one of the computers that I worked on, the companies that made them don’t even exist, like Data General and DAC and all that.
Dave: Oh yeah. I notice you’ve got an HP multimeter on your bench there, one of the hand-held. You don’t see too many of them around anymore.
Bob: Yeah. I don’t think they make those. I just bought a brand new Fluke 289, the true IMS voltmeter.
Chris: Oh yeah, that’s cool.
Dave: With the shit battery life, yeah.
Bob: I go to Costco.
Dave: Go to Costco [laughs].
Chris: I bet you could use some energy harvesting.
Bob: I have a microcurrent here for the energy harvesting, the EEBlog microcurrent.
Dave: Excellent!
Bob: I got it from Adafruit.
Chris: There you go!
Dave: Excellent!
Bob: Actually it’s a great thing because one of the big problems with the energy harvesting and wireless sensor nodes is being able to figure out how your software’s affecting the current drain.
Dave: Drain, yeah, exactly.
Bob: As you noted, and I guess that’s why you make it, it’s really hard to measure microamps.
Dave: Nanoamps. Well the story behind that is I originally made it because I wanted to overcome the burden voltage in the multimeter. It wasn’t necessarily because I wanted to measure nanoamps. I found the burden voltage annoying so I wanted to take that out of the equation. I thought when I was designing it, I thought I can throw in a nanoamp range, yeah, that might come in handy one day. That’s what most people seem to buy it for these days, is the fact that it can measure nanoamps. I didn’t think that would be a target market five years ago, when I designed it.
Bob: No I think it’s perfect for that. Speaking of multimeters, my dad was Ham radio operator and that’s partly how I got into it.
Chris: That’s awesome!
Bob: He had one of the Simpson meters [inaudible 01:08:12]
Dave: The 260 probably.
Chris: Yeah.
Bob: My dad and I would butt heads quite a bit because I would use the tools and not put them back and he would come and want something and couldn’t find the tools and it was always… but he always wanted me to work with him on stuff too, so I guess it wasn’t such a bad thing. I used to burn out that meter every once in a while because it’s tube days and it’s 300 volts and you’d have it on the arms and stick it across your 100 volts and burn out. Then he’d have to go replace the resistors in the thing.
Dave: They weren’t very forgiving.
Bob: No.
Chris: No diodes built in.
Bob: No.
Chris: No mercury valves or whatever it would be the [inaudible 01:08:59] diodes.
Dave: You usually wouldn’t burn out the meter movement because I think the meter movement had diode protection across it. I’m not sure about the Simpson 260 but most meters had, yeah, back-to-back diodes across the meter, so you wouldn’t blow that out. But as you said, you’d blow out important resistors.
Bob: The dividing resistors and so you’d wind them with… well he worked out at Hanford, which is an atomic plant up in Washington State, so he had access to some laboratory gear, so we’d wind new resistors to put in the front end of…
Dave: That’s awesome!
Chris: That’s really cool!
Bob: Yeah, my first radios had mercury vapor rectifiers in them and the old OA2s which had a nice argon glow to them. There were lots of smells and sensation and my first radio had a crystal oscillator driving a 6L6 [final 01:09:59]. It was (01:10:00)cathode keyed, so when you’d un-key the thing, it would come up to 300 volts, and if your fingers slipped off, you’d get the shock of your life.
Chris: Oh my God!
Bob: But it’s stuff you’d never get away with today but it was amazing.
Chris: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Dave: Yeah, yeah.
Bob: I remember once this old railroad guy gave me boxes of batteries because they would replace the lamps with new batteries and they were those 6 volt…
Chris: The wet cells?
Bob: Yeah, well they were not wet, they were just… I can’t described them but they’re bigger than D cells but they were…
Dave: They were lantern.
Bob: Lanterns.
Dave: Well we used to call them lantern batteries.
Bob: Yeah.
Dave: Yeah.
Chris: Even with the spring terminal on top and everything like the 12 volt?
Bob: Yeah. They were 6 volts I think.
Dave: Yeah, yeah.
Bob: So I had like 50 of them, so I thought well let’s just…
Chris: Yeah, of course, that’s why I [can be serious 01:11:00].
Bob: That made a really scary power supply.
Chris: For trying to get induction in this, yeah.
Bob: Exactly!
Chris: Yeah.
Dave: Well you could do the same thing with 9 volt batteries today; you don’t even need to wire them up. They just clip back to back and you can get 1,000 of them and put them in series and you can arc shit over. It’s really, you know, it’s really dangerous.
Bob: Actually I was replacing all the batteries at a summer camp that we were helping out at and sticking them in my pocket as I went along one day. I also had my keys in that pocket and all of a sudden my pocket started getting a little hot.
Dave: Oh no! My leg is melting.
Bob: Yeah, those 9 volt batteries.
Dave: And just before that, you used to ride a dinosaur to school.
Bob: That’s right.
Dave: Yeah.
Bob: Actually, it’s amazing what people used do to, though. My first radios were all World War II surplus but they weren’t that old at that point because the war was only like 15 years…
Chris: 22 years.
Bob: Korean War surplus.
Chris: Oh, there you go, yeah, nice.
Dave: Chris, you’ve heard of the Korean war, I’m surprised.
Chris: Yes, I had some relatives serve in it. And also I’ve seen M*A*S*H.
Bob: That’s about what I know about it.
Chris: Yeah.
Dave: Well they don’t call it the forgotten war for nothing.
Bob: You know there’s another thing that’s kind of interesting is when I was a Ham radio operator in my teen years, I joined this thing called Military Affiliate Radio Service. So we actually handled traffic and phone patches for soldiers that were over in Vietnam at the time.
Chris: Really!
Bob: And that was how people were able to talk to their families back then. It was very sporadic because you know how hard it is to talk on HF compared to Vietnam anyhow and so we…
Chris: You have to go for the right [inaudible 01:13:05].
Bob: Yeah. So we would pass messages and sometimes do phone patches for people which would be very brief, just because the conditions wouldn’t support it for too long. But now in Iraq or Afghanistan they just have cell phones.
Chris: Skype.
Bob: Skype and talk, so that’s another major way how things have changed because that was the state of the art.
Chris: Yeah, that’s pretty cool.
Bob: One of the things that the Ham radio did lead to was I got my commercial radio telephone license and then I worked on two-way radios when I was in high school, and that was a really good job for a high school kid.
Dave: What actually repairing them or…?
Bob: Yeah. Well my very first job when I was 15, I was working in a TV shop when they used to actually repair TVs, you know, check the tubes and do all that stuff. It was a two-way radio business, so I worked for the local Motorola company and they installed radios for the public utilities and people that… and phone patches, even mobile radio, you used to have to call into an operator and then they’d patch you into the telephone network. It was crazy when you think about it.
Chris: Yeah, I mean that’s just hanging out there then, right; it’s not like it’s like a private phone call at that point.
Bob: Yeah, well there’s that too.
Chris: Yeah, you’re basing it on the fact that people own radios.
Dave: I can remember listening into people’s mobile phone conversations, back when we had the analog network. It was on 700 megahertz or something and I’d tune in with my scanner and you know it was boring as bird shit, you know, “I’ll be home at 7.00.” “What do you want for dinner, honey?”
Chris: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Bob: This new phone it’s so cool. Yeah, it’s way different now.
Chris: You’re teaching now too though, you said statistics but you have some other stuff. like your research that you’ve done there and other stuff you’ve taught there. What was the… what was the one I saw in there? It was… crud! I lost it. What are some of the courses you taught? Oh here we go, finite element method. Is that like actual magnetic finite element analysis-type stuff?
Bob: Yeah and antennae stuff.
Chris: Oh antennae stuff, okay. I [inaudible 01:15:39] a class for transformers and he did some finite element stuff.
Bob: Yeah. When I started working in that, I started working with this group at McGill up in Montreal and Pete Sylvester and these guys, and they adapted that method from what civil engineers used to do but we used to use it to design electric machines like the actuators and disk drives. The actuator has a certain forced response to the current going through the coil but that becomes a game block in the server loop, so you want to map out how that varies with the angle and we could model that with the finite elements because we could get an accurate model of the magnetic fields.
Dave: It’s a very common technique for all sorts of things, very wide ranging.
Bob: Yeah.
Chris: FEA even?
Bob: Well yeah because you’re solving the differential equations and [espinements 01:16:43] have the same equations, have the same solution so you know I initially started out using a thermal model, which was just solving [inaudible 01:15:50] equation but it was for heat flow but you could change the names of things and then it became for magnetic materials.
Chris: That’s awesome!
Bob: But then there’s some special things that Maxwell’s equations do that thermal things don’t do that you had to take into account. So we developed our own programs for doing that. And actually you talk about the disk drive business being incestuous, but the finite element world is really… like the guy that started Ansys and HFSS and all that, [Salton Sendez 01:17:31] was a graduate student of Pete Sylvester who is a guy that I was working with at McGill. Yes, so I taught some courses in that because it’s a neat way to… you know, there’s only about three or four problems that you can actually solve in electromagnetics by hand, then you have to go over to computer methods. But that came along with digital computers too in the rise of PCs and the power of what you can do with those. And there’s a lot of interest in mixed physics models now. So you have eddy current heating and that couples into a thermal model so you can model the actual…
Chris: It’s like holistic now almost. It’s like current creates heat, affects current back and forth kind of thing.
Bob: Yeah, yeah, they do actually.
Chris: Wow!
Bob: In the magnetic world, that’s sure the case.
Chris: Just because the materials change or what?
Bob: The materials have changed. Most things have magnetic properties that are dependent on temperature. In fact what they do in disk drives now, they’ve gone over to real heroics in disk drives because there is something called the super power magnetic limit, which has to do with if you keep making the bits smaller and smaller, you get to a point where just thermal energy can cause them to flip on their own.
Dave: Yeah, nasty business.
Chris: Yeah.
Bob: The way they used to prevent that is increase the coercivity or the resistance to change of flipping. The problem with that is then you have to increase the fields that come out of the recording head and you reach a point where you really can’t push it any further. So what they’re doing now in the current generation of disk drives, is they use a laser to temporarily suppress the coercivity by heating the material. Then you write on it and then turn off the laser and it cools quickly and sort of freezes in the magnetic pattern.
Chris: Wow! Just hearing about this stuff, I mean I’m very impressed with all this stuff, but it’s just like…
Bob: It’s like a house of cards.
Chris: It’s amazing, there’s so much energy spent on this, not even energy, but just so much brain power to just keep squeezing more data on there. I know that it’s an economic driver thing but, man, (01:20:00) it’s so cool.
Bob: You know, you can buy little terabyte drives at Costco now for…
Chris: Yeah, right.
Bob: That’s the result of it.
Chris: Right. Right. Then we put Jersey Shore, we store digital editions of Jersey Shore. That’s the ultimate thing that my brain goes to or Facebook.
Bob: Actually, the story of the increase in the aerial density, they call it the bits per square inch in disk drives is pretty amazing because it’s gone up at a very consistent rate over the years. There’s just like orders of magnitude every few years.
Chris: Yeah. Is there Davidson Law or… who got named after that one?
Bob: Oh the super power magnetic limit?
Chris: Yeah.
Bob: I don’t know, it’s just called the… we’re not as clever. We’ll have the marketing guys working with us so we’ll just call it the super power magnetic limit.
Chris: That’s catchy!
Bob: They said if HP sold sushi, they would call it cold dead fish.
[laughter].
Bob: Somebody else came up with the name sushi to make it sound good. That’s the problem with HP. The neat thing about HP is it was selling to other engineers so we knew our audience.
Dave: Yeah, exactly. That’s the difference.
Chris: It doesn’t matter if the test equipment’s all four-digit numbers, you just assign your own value in your head of, it’s something awesome.
Bob: Internally, we used to talk about the next bench phenomenon. You would see what the engineers needed on the next bench and then develop a tool…
Dave: Look on the next bench and then… yeah.
Bob: … to support that.
Chris: That’s crazy.
Dave: I think our time’s almost up.
Bob: Yeah.
Chris: Yeah, I think so too, but I think we could probably keep going for what another what, three hours, four hours.
Dave: As usual.
Bob: I’ve got more Woodchuck here, I’ thinking about going all evening.
Dave: I have to ask what this Woodchuck thing was, I have no idea before the show.
Bob: Hard cider from Vermont.
Chris: Delicious, delicious cider.
Bob: Yeah. It’s got a Woodchuck on the front of it.
Chris: Yup.
Dave: I don’t think you can buy cider here.
Bob: You need to have apples.
Dave: Well you probably can but you don’t hear of anyone drinking cider here.
Bob: Do you have apples?
Dave: Yeah.
Bob: Then they probably have cider. They may make apple juice and they probably get cider eventually.
Chris: Yeah, exactly.
Dave: Well, yeah, you can buy apple juice, yeah.
Chris: Some parent leave it in the sippy cup too long and then they think well we should keep doing this.
Bob: Just leave it under the sink there for a while.
Chris: There you go.
Dave: All right. Okay.
Bob: Don’t put it back in the fridge and…
Chris: Bob, thanks so much for being on the show.
Bob: Absolutely!
Chris: We’d love to have you back on some time and hear more about what you’re doing.
Dave: Where can we find you? Where can we follow you? People want to see more Hoodie HP photos.
Bob: Well those are kept in the archive but…
Dave: Well bring them out, I’d love to see these.
Bob: I’m WA7IUT on Twitter, that’s my Ham radio call sign. Then www.ambientsensors.com.
Chris: Lots of good projects and blog posts and stuff on there. You said you were getting back into…
Bob: I’m getting back into doing that, yeah.
Dave: Awesome! Thanks, Bob.
Chris: We’ll see everyone next week.
Dave: Catch you later, Bob.
Bob: Okay. Take care.
(TC 01:23:56)

The post Transcript of Episode #144 – Hoodied HP Hijinks first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

(TC 0:00:00)

INTRODUCTION: Welcome to The Amp Hour, I’m Dave from the EEVBlog. And I’m
Chris Gammell of Chip Report TV and Chris Gammell’s Analog Life. And I’m Ian Lesnet
from Dangerous Prototypes.
Dave: Hey, Ian, thanks for joining us.
Ian: Thank you so much for having me.
Chris: I did not realize your name was pronounced like that; I feel bad
now.
Dave: Yes, so do I.
Chris: I’ve been saying it wrong.
Ian: Well you’ll never actually hear me use my last name, that’s why in
forums and even in presentations at Maker Faire, I insist that they just
put Ian.
Chris: Really! Interesting!
Dave: Oh really, okay!
Ian: It’s much easier for everyone that way.
Chris: That’s good.
Dave: Right.
Chris: That is easier. All right, cool!
Dave: You see, I’m exactly the opposite because David is so common and then
David Jones is so common, I’ve had to put my middle initial when I used to
publish stuff, so that I didn’t get confused with any other David Jones’s.
So I had to put David L. Jones just to differentiate myself from everyone
else. You’re going the celebrity one name route, hah!
Ian: Well I think the Dangerous Prototypes fills it in.
Dave: Yeah, of course, yeah. So you’re an open hardware aficionado?
Ian: Oh yes! At Dangerous Prototypes we try to make a new open source
hardware project every month. Open hardware means, of course, that all the
files, the documentation, the pictures, even the articles and things we
write about our hardware, it’s all licensed under an open license so anyone
can take it and use it just about however they want.
Dave: The million dollar question is what license do you prefer?
Ian: Okay, well you know in the past we’ve done a lot of creative comments,
attribution share-alike, so you have to share it as well and you have to
our name on it. But increasingly, we’re doing public domain.
Dave: Oh, interesting!
Ian: Just do what whatever you want with it.
Dave: Right.
Ian: I come from this as a writer and a blogger, and my first open hardware
was published on Hack a Day and other blogs, and really the license is just
a formality.
Dave: Yeah.
Ian: I really want people to do what they want with the work and have a
good time with it.
Dave: Hmm, hmm.
Ian: I really don’t want them to worry about licensing restrictions or any
of that kind of stuff. And I’m not into the philosophy of licensing.
Dave: Yeah.
Ian: I know there’s good reasons that people do all sorts of different
license types. What I really want is the least amount of BS possible…
Dave: Awesome! That’s a good idea.
Ian: … for the people using our stuff.
Dave: Yeah.
Ian: And so, you know, public domain is the way to do that. We disclaim
all rights, except our trade mark on the name, and then people are able to
use it however they want. And that started with development boards and
breakout boards because you’re making a board specifically for an engineer
to use to build or learn a project. And why one earth would you lock that
down?
Dave: Yeah, I know.
Ian: In my mind, that’s like a text book saying well every time you use
this formula you found here you have to attribute this text book, and
that’s not generally the way it works.
Chris: I wouldn’t put it past too many publishers though; I think some of
them might go the mall eventually. Charge you 200 bucks and then 50 cents
per equation.
(laughter)
Ian: So I really just want people to be able to use our stuff however they
want, especially the development boards and the breakout boards. Stuff
that’s intended for engineers to use it in their own projects and to
quicken their development cycle. We’re putting all of that out under
public domain now.
Dave: Fantastic! Thumbs up, definitely.
Ian: Well it hasn’t hurt us any yet.
Dave: Right. How did you get into all this? You started on Hack a Day,
but what about before that, have you always published stuff, worked on
projects and stuff like that? Tell us about your background.
Ian: I saw in the write-up there was a question about my education.
Dave: Oh okay.
Ian: I did start as an engineer but I wasn’t very good at it and I didn’t
like it very much.
Dave: Ohh!
Ian: So in my Master’s degree I moved to urban planning and regional
development, and I also started a PhD in that as well. And when I did my
PhD, I started writing a dissertation about using wireless sensors and
wireless sensor networks to learn things about cities and measure things in
cities. And I worked with, what was called, the Berkley Smart mode at the
time, based on the TinyOS operating system. And I got this equipment and I
tried to implement it and it just didn’t work very well.
Dave: Mmm.
Ian: So of course, after being frustrated with it for a while, I had to
whip out my asset etch tank and start building QFN radio boards in my
dormitory room, on top of a hotplate. And that’s really where I learnt the
nuts and bolts of electrical engineering, something aside from the theory.
And that I found I liked quite a lot.
Chris: Yeah, fun stuff, right.
(laughter)
Ian: So in the process of developing this wireless sensor network, which
ultimately I always wanna point out, fails. It was just a disaster of a
project.
Chris: Is that just like a general sweeping statement?
Dave: Why? Please, tell us. Let’s get into the technical details. Why
did this thing fail? Was it politics or was it engineering?
Ian: God, no, it was engineering and my lack of ability to pull that off as
my first major project, no question about it.
Chris: Right. That was a big bite to take I think but yeah.
Ian: Yes, yes. But along the way, I developed a number of tools and a
number of scripts and a number of things that eventually became the Bus
Pirate. I developed these tools for debugging problems I didn’t
understand, especially doing things very low cost because I was a starving
grad student, and since I wasn’t in a proper engineering department, I
didn’t have access to the tools you would have if you were in an electrical
engineering department doing this, instead of an urban planning department.
Dave: Mmm, right.
Ian: So I developed all of these little tools and all these little helpers
that eventually became things like the Bus Pirate. So for a few years, I
published the Bus Pirate on my private blog, on my own website. And then
eventually I went to write for Hack a Day, the fairly well known blog, and
I wrote features for them, and I started writing a few features about the
Bus Pirate and how it had developed over time, and people were actually
quite interested in it and it really surprised me. And after about a year
of writing about it on Hack a Day, Eric Pan from Seeed Studio, a
manufacturing company in China, who does exclusively open hardware,
approached me and said hey, you know, we’ve had some readers say they’d
really like to buy some Bus Pirates. And we can make some; we can make as
few as twenty and try to sell them. And I laughed. I said there’s no way
in the world anybody wants to buy this, you’re not gonna sell twenty of
’em.
(laughter)
Ian: You’re gonna have a warehouse…
Dave: You’ll be left holding a bag of nineteen, you know…
Ian: Yeah, exactly! I figure there’s gonna be twenty widgets sitting there
rotting in a warehouse in China, and, you know, I was still in the graduate
student mentality that was a lot o’ money there.
Chris: Yeah. You gotta take delivery; those’ll be sitting in your dorm
room under your bed.
Ian: Yeah, exactly, exactly.
Chris: Oh, man!
Ian: but we ran the Bus Pirate as a pre-sale, which I guess these days
you’d do Kick Starter and Indiegogo. But we just did a pre-sale and a pre-
order with Seeed Studio on their site and we did it as a fund raiser for
Hack a Day. And you know in a week I think we sold 1,000 of them.
Chris: Awesome!
Dave: Holy crap!
Ian: And I was really impressed and just couldn’t believe it. So from
there I started Dangerous Prototypes to release my new open hardware
projects.
Dave: So how many of these things have you sold now? How many are out
there in the wilds?
Ian: Of Bus Pirates?
Dave: I’ve certainly got one and I think somebody sent me another one.
Ian: People ask me that; it’s really hard to say because of the number of
non-official channels and quasi-official channels.
Dave: Yeah. Guesstimate?
Ian: I would guess there’s somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 of them.
Dave: Wow!
Chris: Dang!
Dave: Awesome!
Ian: I mean that’s still a very tiny compared to large production runs, I’m
sure.
Dave: No, no, of course, but as…
Ian: I’m quite proud of it.
Chris: It’s not consumer but…
Dave: But as kits and hardware products go, that is an absolute winner.
Ian: Great!
Dave: Generally, back from the old magazine days when I was a boy, you
know, when you published a magazine, if there was 1,000 of ’em that was,
you know, you had made it, that was a massively popular project if you sold
1,000. But nowadays with the Internet and the communications revolution
and where you’ve got an instant, ready… like on Hack a Day, you’ve got a
ready audience of many, many tens of thousands of people, then yeah it’s
easy to sell 1,000 of something these days if you have the audience, or if
you get it listed on the right blog. So yes, 20, ha! That’s great.
Ian: Yeah, I never thought we’d sell 20.
Dave: Oh boy! Been there, done that.
Chris: So you’re still working with Seeed Studio and everything though,
right? Everything kinda still…?
Ian: Yeah, it’s one of the things that makes us, sort of, unique. We are
almost exclusively an open hardware design shop. I have never sold
anything myself. I don’t run a website that takes money. I don’t do any
of the fulfillment stuff, what I derisively call putting things in boxes,
stamps on them and taking them to the post office.
Chris: So you’re the smartest electronics designer in the world, is that
the idea?
Ian: Well, I think what I’m good at is designing hardware(TC 0:10:00),
writing documentation, keeping a blog going. What I’m not good at is doing
the fulfillment side. And Seeed Studios there in Shenzhen, China, where
the vast majority of the world’s stuff is made these days, and they’re
right in the middle of it and have experience doing it and they do quite a
good job, especially for a very small runs, which, you know, nobody’s doing
these tiny runs, and have someone supporting open hardware with batches of
100 to 500 to 1,000 is just really excellent. And they do a fantastic job
of that and they work with other designers too, so it’s not just my stuff
on a site I’m trying to promote. I have the benefit of other people coming
to the site for other people’s projects and seeing mine and wanting those
as well. So what we do is exclusively the design, and what I like to say
the stuff we’re good at. I’m not sure everyone would agree with that, but
I’ll say that now. I think the stuff we’re good as it the design and the
documentation, writing firmware, providing user support. And we farm out
all of the manufacturing, all of the fulfillment, all of that stuff to
Seeed Studio, and to a lesser extent of course, our distributors. We have
distributors around the world who also take care of selling things and
advertising our projects.
Dave: You’re saying ‘we’ there, have you got more than one person working
at Dangerous Prototypes?
Ian: Yeah. That’s sort of a unique thing about us as well. There is no
central office, everyone works wherever they are. But what we generally
try to do is hire people out of our forum.
Dave: Oh!
Ian: so if we have people somewhere where we can afford them, who are
looking for a job and we can arrive at some agreement that everyone’s happy
with, we try to hire people out of our forum. There’s the advantage of
they already know our stuff, generally inside and out because we’re open
source. You don’t have to train them and you get to see what they can do
upfront, without having to go through any sort of job interview.
Dave: Got it. So they’re not really full-time employees as such. Do you
do it like on a contract basis, or is a very informal, handshake kind of,
yeah we’ll pay you X a month and you write some documentation for us, or
something?
Ian: Well we have 3 full-time contractors.
Dave: Oh okay, right.
Ian: Yeah, and that, of course, we have contracts and everything is fairly
official.
Dave: Okay, right.
Ian: Then aside that, we have a number of part-time contributors, both
people who are more like contractors, who have a contract for X number of
hours or X number of dollars per hour, or something like that. And we’ve
got probably four or five of those who work to varying amounts. And then
we pay people who contribute to open source. So if we have a contributor
who drops by and puts a new chunk of code down, if we have people who are
active in providing user support in our forums, if we have someone who
contributes a new project and says will you guys please consider making
this, then we will pay them as much as we can.
Dave: Nice.
Chris: That’s great.
Ian: Whether that’s a chunk a month while they’re contributing or royalty
for a project, or whatever, we just try to find some way to make open
source pay because I know one of the coolest things for me is that open
source could actually pay money.
Dave: Yes.
Ian: That is something I’d love to do as a passion. I would do it
regardless of whether I got paid, but it was really cool when you actually
get a check from that work you did for fun, not because you needed to eat
at the end of the day.
Chris: Right.
Ian: And I like to give other people that feeling as often as I can as
well.
Chris: It’s like in Fight Club where they get to go from just the one day a
week to seven days a week, right, that’s what it enables, you know, like
I’ll come Tuesday and Thursday.
Dave: And the interesting thing there is that you’re still able to do that,
whilst still taking the minority of the retail price because as everyone
knows in this kind of business, the person who makes the most money on this
stuff is the retailer, i.e., Seeed Studio, who do it all. I mean you’re
only taking a relatively small percentage of the retail price there. So
it’s amazing that you’re still able to do that and run that business and
pay these people, even though you’re sort of, don’t like to say getting the
breadcrumbs but, you know, you are probably getting the smallest
percentage, not actually retailing the hardware yourself.
Ian: Yeah, to some extent I would agree, especially when it comes to
distribution deals. You know, we really take a hit to get our stuff out
there at the distributors, and that’s fine because it’s a partnership where
we make some money, they make some money, but more importantly, we have a
larger presence and that has a value too. But with Seeed Studio, it’s not
quite the same as licensing deals other open hardware designers have, with
say SparkFun or some of the other companies out there. We actually get a
quote at 100, 500, 1,000, 10,000 and then we decide how many we want to
order. And then we set the final price. So we get the difference in price
there; we’re not just working on a percentage royalty with Seeed.
Dave: Oh, okay, right. Got it.
Ian: And when I privately compared what other people are doing with their
projects, I think Seeed treats us extremely well. We come out on top with
that model compared to what I’ve heard other people doing before.
Dave: Got it!
Chris: That’s cool.
Ian: I want to object to the breadcrumbs comment actually.
Dave: Right, okay. No, all right.
Ian: We’re doing a little better than breadcrumbs.
Dave: Okay.
Ian: I don’t want someone to think that we’re just limping along.
Dave: No, no, you certainly aren’t.
Chris: I mean you can support a lot of people though; you’re forum is huge.
So you said you get contributors from there but you also get new projects
from there? You guys still doing the… was it every week that you said you
do new projects, is that still…?
Dave: Month.
Chris: Every month, sorry.
Ian: On average, we try to have twelve new projects put into production a
year.
Chris: That’s crazy.
Ian: Because of the absurdity of getting a project produced, that maybe
five projects one month and then a project every couple of months, but we
try to think on average we’d get twelve new projects a year into
production. And if we’re having a slow year, sometimes that can include
revisions as well.
Chris: Okay. We’re counting!
Ian: If they took us any amount of time.
Dave: Although, granted, these are mostly bare board-type projects, right?
It’s not like you have to design (inaudible 16:22) closures…
Chris: Oh here comes Dave talking about closures.
Dave: … you know, you’re not selling commercial products.
Chris: Wah, wah, wah.
Dave: Yeah, yeah. Exactly.
Ian: No, you’re absolutely right.
Dave: It is substantially easier to get just a bare board out there than it
is to…
Ian: Absolutely! Yes, it is. We do only bare boards.
Dave: Because otherwise you wouldn’t be able to do twelve a year, I think,
if you had to develop like a form.
Ian: No, I don’t think so.
Dave: For one commercial-looking product.
Ian: We do have a standard PCB size now.
Chris: Oh yeah?
Ian: And we can come back to that.
Dave: Oh right, okay.
Ian: It’s supposed to make it much easier to kit things up and to case
things, but we’re still working on that.
Chris: That’s good.
Dave: Right.
Ian: Besides the twelve boards we try to produce every year, right now
we’re R&D’ing about one project a week.
Chris: Wow!
Ian: And most of those go up onto the blog. Most of them are ideas where
we put up a schematic or PCB and that’s the end of it. Many of them will
send out and have the PCBs made, and we have a store that we call the Free
PCB store, it’s just a simple Zen Cart store. And I keep an inventory of
all the boards I’ve had made there and then people can get a free PCB
coupon and check out, or buy a board with their free PCB coupon, then they
can build the project themselves. So a lot of our projects will design,
will open source it, it’s public domain, take it, make your own fortune off
of it. But we decide ultimately that the cost/benefit ratio of getting it
into production, versus supporting it and what we’re gonna make on it in
the end, just isn’t worth it. But because we’re all open hardware bus and
what we wanna do is design hardware, we do that, even though it’s not
necessarily a profitable part of the business, we’re still designing things
that have no chance of being produced. And I think that’s one thing that
you can do as a very small, very loose-knit open hardware company that I
could never do if I had an actual manager telling me how I should spend my
money.
Chris: I have this great idea, we’re gonna give stuff away.
Ian: Yeah!
Chris: You’re fired.
Dave: Well that’s essentially all part of the game really. If you enjoy
doing that sort of stuff, that’s what you do, you know, and it helps build
up your rep as well when you’re doing stuff like that.
Ian: Absolutely, it’s great publicity.
Dave: Yeah. I like it.
Chris: So what about travel? You said your manufacturer’s out in China, in
Shenzhen. I forget how exactly to pronounce it, is it Shingen, right?
It’s exactly as I said it.
Ian: Yeah. I’m not a Chinaphile yet, I’ve only been there a couple of
times, so give me a few more years and I’ll have the proper pronunciation.
Chris: Looking at your YouTube channel and talking with you online, you go
everywhere. Is it like you’ve been listening to Johnny Cash songs and
you’ve been everywhere man or what’s your deal?
Ian: Well for about the last year and a half or so, I’ve been doing the
Maker Faire circuit. A year and a half ago, the very first Maker Faire I
went to was the Bay area Maker Faire in California and Seeed Studio was the
sponsor that year and had a big booth and invited me, as well as some of
their other open hardware designers, to come and exhibit there. And at the
time, I had avoided going to Maker Faires, I had avoided going to DEF CON
and things like that. I wasn’t interested in being out there in that way.
I’m a kind of a shy geeky guy.
Dave: No!
Ian: I didn’t wanna be seen. I didn’t have my picture on my blog. Seeed
Studio thought I was a 50-year old engineer.
Chris: Well maybe you’ve changed, but I don’t think you’re like that
anymore.
Ian: Well no, that’s what I decided. After going to this first Maker
Faire, it was like wow, you actually have to put yourself out there. You
have to be the face of your business. You have to own the process of
pressing the flesh, shaking hands, saying hi, meeting people. And besides
all that business garbage, it’s actually quite fun (TC 0:20:00) and you
meet really cool people who know… well for me, people who know may more
than I know.
Dave: There’s always people who know more than you do.
Ian: And are just brilliant people to talk to. It’s just been amazing to
meet all the people. And so after that I went to Maker Faire, New York,
and the Open Hardware Summit, and from there it just, sort of, cascaded
into a year-long circuit of doing these Maker Faires in Japan and Singapore
and Shenzhen, China and just all over the place, the UK and on and on and
on. And when we go, we try to hook up with the local hackerspace and we
try to hook up with readers, you know we have readers all over world, so we
try to hook up with some local readers, and visit their local electronics
part markets. And some of the places they used to be the manufacturing
capitals of the world, like Japan. In Tokyo they have Akihabara, which is
a fairly well known electronics part market. Now it’s in decline, there’s
no question it’s in decline. You’re gonna find more Anime, maid cafés and
more, weird, crazy Japanese stuff in Akihabara than you’re going to find
electronics now. But back in the day, it was the heyday for all the
Japanese manufacturers to go there and buy parts that they would use in
manufacturing. And people would go there to buy the absolute latest
electronics stuff. So we did a video there; that was our very first video
we shot in an electronics part market and we went with Tokyo hackerspace
and shot a film. And the very first time we went, was the Tokyo Maker
Faire and the video was unusable. We were gawking so much at everything,
mouths hanging open, just sort of staring and pointing, there was nothing
usable on this video whatsoever.
Chris: Do you still have that footage because you should post that if you
can.
Ian: I do, I do.
Chris: If you can you should just see what’s in the cut takes.
Ian: It’s me in our regular shot, and we’re both just sort of err, err, and
nobody said anything, so we had to go back in February and re-shoot the
whole thing.
Dave: (laughing) Oh no!
Ian: With actually making an effort to talk a little bit.
Dave: Ahh, that’s great!
Ian: And so that still stands out, I think, as our most popular one.
There’s something about geeks in Tokyo that they just go together well and
that’s been our most popular video. But from there we made an effort to
shoot a video in every parts market we visited. So from there, I went to
Seoul, South Korea, which has a parts market called Chona Chong and the
hackerspace there is right in the middle of that, so we shot “Geek Tour,
Seoul” and from there we went to Shenzhen, China, which has Hua Qiang Bei
Bay, which is, I guess, the world’s largest wholesale part market. There’s
thousands of little stands covering six floors of twenty buildings over a
whole neighborhood, with nothing but switch samples and connector samples
and crystals, and resistors, you know, anything you could possibly want.
And we’d been doing our best to shoot what we call our “Geek Tour” videos
there and show what it’s like, how people buy things, and importantly, how
people like us, how hobbyists can actually use these markets because most
of them are intended for big manufacturers, but you can get in there as a
hobbyist and buy things as well.
Chris: Yep.
Ian: So it’s been an amazing last year and half to do all of that travel.
Put in a lot of miles. Learnt how to do a long haul flight, which was
something I was not a fan of before, but now I can, kind of, lean over and
sleep.
Dave: Well I know all about long haul flights.
Ian: I think pulling the tray table down and sleeping on it; that’s how I
made it to Tokyo and back this time.
Dave: (laughing) Oh dear, oh dear!
Ian: And recently we did India; that was an amazing trip. We went to India
and met up with twenty readers in Bangalore and rented this crazy painted
up magic mystery bus we called it, and they took us all around Bangalore
and we visited all of these industrial sites and we saw a PCB-stuffing
factory and we saw open hardware shops and we visited their local
electronics wholesale markets, and we actually did that throughout three
cities in India; it was just an absolute hoot.
Dave: Nice!
Ian: An amazing time.
Dave: Did you get Delhi belly?
Ian: You mean did I get sick?
Dave: Yeah.
Chris: Delhi belly.
Ian: No, no, absolutely not.
Dave: No, really!
Ian: The food was amazing.
Dave: Oh okay.
Ian: I was quite careful about what I ate, I’ll admit that.
Dave: Oh right, there you go.
Ian: I have a rule on all of these trips just because when you’re on
business and you’re having a really tight shooting schedule, you actually
feel like you’re making a TV program, which is very hectic and you’re up
really early writing up your locations and what you’re gonna say there and
what you need to show.
Chris: Dave, is that how you do it? I don’t think that’s how everyone does
it, Ian, I have to say.
Dave: I remember getting sick once. I went to the US, I got food poisoning
at the Hilton, of all places, and that knocked me around for two weeks. I
almost didn’t eat anything for the next two weeks.
Ian: Jesus! Oh man!
Dave: I came home and I had lost like 10 kilos. It was shocking.
Ian: Yeah. Oh man.
Dave: Yeah. That sort of thing, you have to be careful, it could ruin your
trip, it really can.
Ian: Yeah, I’m very careful on all the trips, even ones in first-road
countries for that very reason. You’re eating on the roads, you’re always
eating things that are questionable quality anyways, but my rule is hot and
fresh. If I can see it cooked, I’m okay. If it’s steaming hot, I’m okay.
And it doesn’t matter if it’s from the street, you know, street food or a
restaurant or whatever; those rules usually serve me well because there’s
nothing worse than getting sick on one of these trips where every minute is
already accounted for. And you can’t lose… even if you are sick, I’d
probably have to go shoot the “Geek Tour” video set. That wouldn’t be
pleasant.
Chris: I have your next, you know, monthly project, you could do a DIY IR
thermometer and you could just point it at stuff you like – I’m not eating
that, it didn’t cross the threshold.
(laughter)
Dave: What you’ve gotta do is just deep fry everything. Just live on deep
fried grease for two weeks.
Ian: In a lot of places that’s pretty unavoidable; that seems to be the
local cuisine.
Chris: It is.
Dave: Yeah.
Chris: Oh man!
Dave: Speaking of India, we have a question from, I will not even attempt
to pronounce his user name on (reddit 0:26:25), who’s from India. He met
you in India, his name is Yeg…
Ian: Yes, (Yegnesh 0:26:29), who we hooked with in Mumbai.
Dave: Yegnesh, yes, he already says, you’ve answered this question but it
could be of benefit to a larger audience. You’ve read the question; you’ve
probably already got a response to it. How did the Seeed guys produce the
bus part and can you step us through the process from the start. How do
you do DFM and all that sort of stuff? How do you load the firmware on the
bus parts, is it done one by one or is there a custom jig, all that sort of
stuff?
Ian: Yeah, sure thing. Sure thing. So DFM is designed for manufacture,
and in my experience with Seeed, since we hand prototype everything and we
use 0603 size and no chip smaller than SSOP, and fairly hand-sortable,
friendly stuff. We don’t have to do a lot of DFM; we don’t have to do a
lot of prep to get something ready to be manufactured. Most of our stuff
has to do with sourcing, getting the right parts, making sure that the
parts they can source in China are the same as the parts we use.
Dave: (laughing) Yes!
Ian: You know, Seeed is very keen to make sure that everything works
perfectly. So if I give a part number for a 3.3 volt regulator, and it’s
not available in China, they will sometimes go out of their way to source
it from the US. And then they’re importing it back and paying duties,
when, in general, we use very generic parts where that’s not necessary. So
sometimes, a quote will come in, and I’ll say ohh, that seems really
expensive and I’ll ask and it’ll be because they were worried that the part
they could source locally wasn’t good enough and so they went ahead and
sourced from the US and then it cost more than expected. So we have a lot
of back and forth on that. But as far as modifying our actual hardware to
prepare it for a pick and place, we’ve never really had to do that because
we already designed fairly to loose standards, to something many people
will be able to hand sort. We also design according to a standard part
list now, so most of the things we do, we don’t have to tell them a
specific part number, we just tell what, from our standard part library,
we’re using, so you can go out and get that much faster then and they
stock, basically, a set of parts that work on all Dangerous Prototypes
boards.
Chris: Ah, so you gotta watch out there, man because you’re becoming the
bigger company now. You’re gonna have your own part number system, then it
gets all crazy and, oh that’s…
Ian: Actually we’re in the process of doing that very thing.
Chris: Oh boy!
Ian: We want to put together a part kit of our parts, enough to build
essentially ten of any board we have.
Dave: It’s all over.
Ian: And we’ve got all these free PCBs so people can then use the part kit
to build the boards and have all the parts without (inaudible 0:29:06).
Chris: It is a great idea but, looking at old schematics, I have an old
Wurlitzer and the part numbers are like 111124, so don’t do that.
Dave: And that’s it; that’s the only design, that’s the only marking on the
schematic.
Chris: That’s all it is, right. And I know it’s an NPN, that’s about it.
So good luck! But that’s an interesting topic too. That’s great having
blog fodder too, just like how you’re setting up part numbering systems.
Dave: Of course.
Ian: We’re going to design our own data sheets on the (inaudible 0:29:35).
Dave: Really? That’s cool!
Ian: Along with, basically, a minimum set of tolerances. Saying a part
should follow within these tolerances. Not specifying necessarily a part
number. We will, of course, specify maybe three dozen part numbers from
different manufacturers that would fit these criteria. But you know,
generally, when you’re just doing digital work, and you need an NPN
transistor, there’s only two or three you really needed to stock.
Chris: Right, yeah.
Ian: (TC 0:30:00) A big current one, a small current one, and generally you
can get away with one. I mean we use, 99% of the time, one general
transistor.
Chris: My inter-analog guy’s screaming right now.
Dave: (laughing).
Ian: Of course analog people are gonna like bash me over the head and never
wanna read my blog and that’s understandable. Analog is not my thing and I
don’t do a lot of analog, but in the digital world we can get away with a
very select limited part list along with a good resistor kit. You know,
with plenty of values in 1% you’re good to go.
Dave: Exactly! And it’s all done and dusted, yeah. They’re almost
entirely different worlds because you, essentially, cannot do what you’re
doing with more complicated analog or more specific products.
Ian: No, absolutely not.
Chris: But then it’s not a mass market either.
Dave: It seems… well that’s right.
Chris: I mean that’s the main thing.
Dave: It seems like every project I’m doing, I am using ten new parts in it
that I’ve never used before. And I have to use them because I’m trying to
meet some cost or performance target for a particular part, and I can’t
just, oh, I’ll use exactly the same part I used last time because it just
doesn’t fit the bill, either in size or price or functionality or whatever.
Chris: Yeah. No, you gotta change your specs too man, that’s the other
thing. But I think the stuff you guys are doing is still really advanced
for a lot of commodity components, so it is cool that you’re able to make
these standard kits; I think that’s gonna be really helpful in the future.
Ian: Yeah, there’s been some requests for it and we’re just interested in
getting the parts out there and making it easier. I met with this guy,
Mitch, in Shenzhen, he’s doing Hackvana…
Chris: Oh yeah, we saw the video.
Ian:… and he’s trying… currently, he’s making PCBs and Sawdust stencils,
but he wants to get parts out there to hackers from the flow of parts
moving through Shenzhen. And one of the things he said that I just totally
agree with, is that you can spend ten hours sitting there trying to fill
your BOM with the cheapest, most appropriate part that you can get locally
or doesn’t cost $1 million to get shipped from another country, or blah,
blah, blah, and you can spend ten hours just sourcing parts for a project
when somebody else has already done that, and maybe hundreds of people have
already done that. And so the goal was just to make it faster and simpler
to pull these parts out and build our boards specifically because we do
give away so many boards, and we also spend a bit of time telling people
where to find the parts that go with the boards if they’re not on our
standard list. And I think having the stuff available would be handy,
though I’m sure the open hardware… I did, two years ago, the Open Hardware
Summit with Eric Pan, we gave a presentation and he talked about a standard
part library that all open source can use. And I think that’s a very lofty
goal.
Dave: Yeah.
Ian: I’m not sure I would propose what I’m doing for all of open source,
but I think from my little tiny corner over here, I could make it easier
for people to build our crap.
Chris: Crap! Come on, man!
Dave: I can continue talking about the Seeed building process if you like?
Chris: Yeah, that’d be great.
Dave: Yeah, please do.
Ian: Okay, so basically I wrote down some steps, I think some of them are
pretty obvious but I’ll lead you through what I understand to be the
process of getting a board made at Seeed. On our side, the first thing is,
we get a quote, we send our part list and our board files and we get a
quote at, it used to 20, 100 and 500, but they stopped doing 20s and now
you do 100, 500, or 1,000, and depending on the price and what we think we
can sell, we’ll order however many of them and they’ll build them and put
them in the store. So understand the first step is they send out all the
PCBs, many people maybe familiar with Seeed’s inexpensive PCB prototyping
services. My understanding is that they boards that are done in volume go
to a different facility that doesn’t specialize in quick turn.
Dave: Yeah, that’s very common.
Ian: They’re always a different color. They always seem quite… the more
bulk boards seem to be higher quality. I’m very happy with the proto
boards as well, but the bulk boards just seem to be like they’re done
through a proper PCB process instead of a quick PCB process. From there,
they source all the parts, from all over Shenzhen. If they can’t find a
part that matches, they’ll import when they have to, but it’s actually
quite expensive to import American parts into China because fairly high
tariffs on that I understand.
Chris: That’s interesting.
Ian: And then for small batches of, say, 100 and sometimes even 500, Seeed
will do pick and place in-house. They have their own pick-and-place
machine the same one SparkFun has, the same as several open source hardware
shops have. And they’ll pick and places batches of 100 to 500, and things
that need to be turned very quickly, they’ll do it right there in-house.
For big things, you know, if we do a batch of 1,000 or more than 1,000,
those get sent off to the professionals all over Shenzhen; they do nothing
day or night but assemble boards. They’re good at it, it’s what they do all
the time and they have very high yields. From there, I guess they inspect
visually. For a new run, they’ll inspect absolutely every board visually.
I think for runs that are established, they depend more on the self-test
than the visual inspection. So then from visual inspection, they’ll move
on to be programmed. With our boards, we use basically a ROM, the same way
you have a ROM from a video game, or a ROM, like an ISO from a CD-ROM, is
an image that has all the information you need to put into the chip. So if
there’s a boot loader for doing upgrades, it’s got the boot loader. If it
has a firmware, the firmware’s in there too. So it’s a single step. You
program this one manufacturing image into the device, and it’s got boot
loader firmware, unique ID, whatever you’ve gotta put in there, it’s all in
there in one programming step. And someone mentioned on the reddit that it
wasn’t SparkFun boot loading, and yes, that’s true. At one point SparkFun
was building the Bus Pirate and they were programming the boot loader, and
there was a little quirk in one revision of that silicon where the internal
oscillator wasn’t stable enough to support 1,500 bps, 115,000 bps whatever
on all the chips; some of them wouldn’t program at that rate. So they had
to back it down at 9,600 baud. So they were programming the boot loader
and then connecting to a computer and programming it over the boot loader
at 9,600 baud for each board they sold, and SparkFun were selling quite a
few of these. And I eventually found out about this and I immediately
wrote to Nate and said, you guys we have this manufacturing image, you just
program it in there one fell swoop, it’s done, no boot loading at all. So
the reddit mentioned that so that’s why I bring it up. So we program one
master image, with a PIC programmer and then run an internal self-test on
the Bus Pirate. So basically, you can jumper two pins and that allows the
Bus Pirate to turn on its power supplies and measure the voltage, make sure
it’s what we would expect to test various chips on the board like the 4066,
that’s used to control the pull up resistors, we can check that. We can
check various parts of the board to make sure, basically, the pins are
moving the way they are; there’s nothing that’s soldered together, no two
pins are soldered together, there’s no problems like that. So every board
we do with Seeed they run some sort of internal self-test like this on the
board, so we know when it leaves Seeed it’s in good working order. That
doesn’t mean that things don’t happen along the way, you know, shipping is
brutal sometimes and bad boards do get out there. But we actually have
very high success with our self-test and it’s so high that when we have a
complaint in the forum, we immediately say we’re just gonna replace it.
Dave: Yeah, it’s easy.
Ian: It’s very rarely we have something that’s you know a defect, and when
it shows up it’s fairly obvious. And we say we’ll just send out a
replacement, don’t worry about it, you don’t have to return anything, we’ll
just give you a new one. That’s my understanding of how the process works
with Seeed.
Dave: Did you design that built-in self-test from the start? Did you go,
right, we’re gonna manufacture a zillion of these things, we really need to
think about how we’re gonna do the build-in self-test? Or did it just go,
oh yeah, look just by coincidence we can just write a few lines of code and
the hardware’s already capable of doing that?
Ian: Well, yeah, I gave a presentation on getting your stuff made, and one
of the steps I mention is that to design your self-test, some way of
testing this widget before you get to that stage. You need to think of it
from the beginning because it’s so hard to bring out test points and design
a rig or reverse engineer a test into it. Now with the Bus Pirate, I got
extremely lucky because it’s a tool, essentially, for measuring things and
debugging things…
Dave: Exactly, yeah.
Ian: By jumpering a few pins, we got it to test and debug itself, so that
was really just an absolutely lucky break.
Dave: That’s why I asked.
Ian: I highly recommend people design it in from the beginning. And now
everything we make, if we need extra pins to do a self-test, we’ll move to
a bigger chip if we have to because the added cost of being able to do that
test from the beginning… sorry, the added cost of having to reverse
engineer that test into the device at the end instead of doing it from the
beginning is not worth the extra cost for our low volumes of you’re using a
bigger chip, using a bigger CPLD, (inaudible 0:39:40) to get a little bit
of extra test logic in there or something. You gotta design for tests from
the beginning, it’s absolutely necessary.
Dave: Now that you know, right?
Ian: Now that I know.
Dave: Exactly. Everyone has to make that mistake.
Ian: Yeah, yeah. One thing I haven’t been able to cover is people often
ask me (TC 0:40:00) how you do the self-test and, of course, that’s gonna
depend on how your hardware’s set up and what you’re doing. But obviously,
I just wanna say, you know have some spare analog to digital converters, so
you can measure voltages from anything that’s supposed to be voltage-based.
Have a few pins so you can detect logic one or logic zero from things that
are logic-based and start from there. It doesn’t have to be very
complicated; it just has to be on the board and ready to go.
Dave: That’s the advantage of using a larger pin count micro than what you
need, for example. Like, you know, if you need twenty, say eighteen IO
pins, don’t you use a 20-pin device because then you got no spare pins left
over to do anything like that.
Ian: Yeah, absolutely!
Dave: That’s the advantage of choosing a larger device upfront that has
more capability built in and then just all those spare pins, well I’ve got
a dozen spare pins, what are you gonna do with them? Well, don’t leave ’em
floating, connect them to various points in your circuit, just so that
later down the track, you can implement that stuff in software rather than
have to mod the boards later or not do the test and be caught short.
Ian: Yeah, absolutely!
Dave: Trap for young players, folks, which I do time and time again still,
you know because I just like the elegance…
Chris: Well you’re still young, Dave, come on man.
Dave: Well because I like the elegance of using just an optimized chip for
the job and not just using some big-arsed one.
Chris: Just sneak it in under the wire.
Dave: Yeah.
Ian: Have you worked with any chips with programmable pin placement?
Dave: Yes, yes, that’s really nice, so you can send the UART to any one of
the pins, for example. The PICS have that capability; well many of the
PICs have that programmable pin.
Ian: Yes. Yeah, the PIC24s.
Dave: Yeah, the PIC24s have that capability; I’ve used that, and that is
quite nice. If people don’t know what we’re talking about there, it means
like all your internal stuff like your UARTs and your SPIs and your ADCs
and all those features built into the chip, most micros on the market they
are two fixed pins, they’re connected up to fixed pins. But some micros,
like the PIC24, which we’re talking about, they have an internal routing
logic, kinda like, you know, an analog FPGA routing thing that allows you
to route that UART to any two pins that you like and it’s just really nice.
Chris: Yeah, that really helps during those ‘oh crap’ moments, right, where
you’re like, oh no!
Dave: Those ‘oh crap’ moments, yes, yes.
Ian: That’s the principle the Bus Pirate’s based on as well. It uses one
of these chips with selectable pins so we can move all of the hardware
modules to whatever pin combination we need for whatever test mode the Bus
Pirate’s in. And you just mentioned loving a very simplified and direct
design and it made me think of that. I know there’s several other chip
families that now have programmable pins as well; I’ve worked with some of
those. And I just love it for the routing, the elegance of the routing.
Dave: Yeah, yeah.
Ian: When it goes, essentially, straight out from the chip; you don’t have
any veers jumping under and coming back up the other side.
Dave: Yeah, I know, it’s nice.
Ian: You’re not routing things around in a snake-like fashion. You
literally come straight out from your chip and everything hooks up just
perfectly and nicely. I’m a big fan of that too.
Dave: Yep, me too.
Chris: So have you had any big ‘oh crap’ moments? I guess the open source
hardware side of it would probably have a couple more eyeballs on it than
maybe a proprietary project would, but have you guys had any huge defects
that maybe might be lessons for people?
Ian: You know we’ve been very fortunate that, so far, we haven’t produced a
batch of anything that, for example, had to be reworked…
Chris: Oh that’s good.
Ian: … or modified or anything like that. I’ve been very fortunate so far.
I’m also really paranoid.
Chris: Knock on wood, right.
(laughter)
Dave: Damn, he’s not gonna sleep tonight.
Ian: It scares me to death to put something with a problem into production
and then what would happen with those boards to have 100 or 1,000 or
something rotting in a warehouse in China somewhere that I can’t do
anything with.
Chris: Yeah. I think you have a lot of goodwill as well though from it
being open source, right.
Dave: Ah, people would understand.
Chris: Yeah, exactly.
Ian: Part of doing the free PCB giveaway is that most of our boards, by the
time I get around to building and programming and testing it, somebody else
has already done it, maybe two or three people.
Chris: Oh really!
Ian: So we actually crowd source that side a lot.
Dave: Right.
Ian: So we actually have not just man eyeballs on the design but we make it
possible for people to get a hold of the board and build it themselves,
and, of course, anybody who’s building service-mount stuff themselves, and
just wants the PCB and has their own parts, they’re pretty bright. These
are really talented, amazing people. And they always point out a number of
things that we should consider before we put it into production. And on
top of that, we also generally do our development in the forum as well, so
we’re not just open source, we’re open development.
Dave: Nice!
Ian: And our projects will be in our SVN archive, in our file repository.
We’ll post progress on the blog. We’ll post updates on the forum. So a
lot of the time, even before we send off the first PCB, there will have
been a dozen or more people who’ve looked over it and told us these
horrible, horrible mistakes we’re about to make.
Chris: As you were saying, electronics designers always have the (inaudible
0:45:21).
Ian: And that gives us plenty of time to go back and fix them. Yeah.
Chris: Yeah.
Dave: That’s brilliant.
Ian: Actually, one thing I did have a minor problem with was the second
project I did, which was the Twitter (watcher 0:45:31), a little network
appliance that would connect to Twitter and get the most recent trending
topics, as well as some tweets to go with them. They needed a unique
Internet ID.
Chris: Oh yeah.
Dave: Yeah.
Ian: I had to get the whole IEE whatever, ID. It’s sort of like a USB ID
only instead of being a per device, it’s like each individual unit, should
have a unique ID.
Dave: Yep.
Ian: And I hadn’t planned for that. I hadn’t really thought that through.
And so I ended, at the last most, buying a bag of those… Microchip makes
some EEPROMs with a built-in MAC… they’re MAC (inaudible 0:46:10)…
Chris: Yes, the 24-bit (inaudible 0:46:11) ID stuff.
Ian: I built in a MAC address and so I just pulled one out and they all got
that same MAC address. Well at least the license said I couldn’t use
Microchip’s that they had used in their demo; that was against the license.
So it was a whole ‘oh crap’ moment. And I ended up taking a train to the
nearest parts supplier that had them on stock, getting them that day,
reading it out on the train so that by the time I got home, I could
recompile the firmware with our own custom unique ID in it and then putting
a screwdriver through that chip and mounting it in a frame to say this is
our destroyed MAC chip with our official MAC number in it.
Dave: Nice!
Chris: Did you like encase it in amber and it’s like the Holy Grail chip,
ohhh.
Ian: I should do that. I could put it in a big block and use it as a
paperweight or put it in a frame.
Chris: Or you should wear it around your neck or something, you know, be
like, this is the one!
(laughter)
So what about some of your other projects then? I’m looking at the forum
and there’s a really nice layout of the all different projects and stuff,
but could you maybe give us some of your other favorite ones to work on and
how other people help contribute with all that stuff as well?
Ian: Yeah, okay. Well our number one thing is the Bus Pirate, and it’s
basically a tool for talking to chips so you have a little terminal window
and you can type in the values you want to send to a chip and it will send
it and get any reply. That helps you avoid that development cycle where
you write some code, program it to your microcontroller, try it out, it
doesn’t work so then you make some changes, compile again, program again,
try again, and you go on this loop trying to learn how a new chip works.
With the Bus Pirate, you just type a few commands, it sends it out. You
know the protocols, most likely correct and working, so if there’s a
problem, it’s something to do with how the chip is working or how you’ve
got it connected, so you’re eliminating a lot of the problems you have with
learning how a new chip works. Some of our other popular stuff is, the Bus
Blaster is extremely popular. And this is a JTAG debugger and JTAG is the
programming interface for lots of modern chips. ARMS use it, but also
(inaudible 0:48:17) and CPLDs and things like that. Lots of chips have
this standard programming connection. And there’s lots of open source
software out there to support JTAG, like Open OCD is a fault debugger for
ARM chips. UR JTAG is used to program (inaudible 0:48:33) as well as
CPLDs, but most of them are still using commercial programmers. Most of
them support a range of commercial programmers, and a few home brew, sort
of, hack kits. And I thought I’d really like to make open hardware to go
with open source software. So I designed the Bus Blaster as a sort of a
universal JTAG debugger. And what we did was we took the same chip that’s
in every manufacturer’s low cost JTAG debugger, as well as most of the
hobby debuggers, the FT2232. It’s the bigger brother of the little FT232
that’s on the older Arduino, and it does USB to serial conversion but also
USB to JTAG. And it has two JTAG channels. So we thought, well, the only
difference amongst manufacturers’ programmers that use this chip is the
buffer logic on the front that translates voltage. What if we used a CPLD
and made the buffer logic programmable. And then to one-up that, we’ll
connect the CPLD as a JTAG connection to the secondary JTAG connection on
the Bus Blaster, on the FT2232. That way, you can, over USB, upload an
entirely new programmer logic into the CPLD on the fly.
Dave: Nice!
Ian: So if you want a .TT link programmer that supports the new two-wire
debug protocol, you got it, just upload it over USB. You want the classic
JTAG key programmer that works with just about everything, you upload that
buffer image, you got it, it’s good to go (TC 0:50:00). And along with
that I might add, that CPLD is able to help out with the self-test so that
we know all the things are functioning properly.
Chris: Nice!
Ian: And that has been one of our most popular boards, and I might also
say, the one that requires the least amount of support.
Dave: Right.
Ian: Since it’s all dependent on the software and it’s very much just a
hardware design with a little bit if programmable logic. We hardly have to
support that at all. So I’m a big fan of the Bus Blaster. Another one we
did recently that was surprisingly popular is our ATX power supply
breakout.
Dave: Ah, yes.
Ian: Lots of people use an old ATX power supply from a computer to make a
bench lab supply. You know, you’ve got plus and minus 12 and if you’re
working with an op amp, having that negative voltage rail is a lifesaver.
If you’re like me and in the digital world most of the time, you won’t
usually use it, or need it. But then you have that one project where you
need an op amp and you just don’t have a negative rail so a PC power supply
has plus or minus 12 volts, a big hefty 5 volts supply and a 3.3 volt
supply. So just about everything you need on a day-to-day basis. And a
lot of our forum users have hacked their power supplies to be a useful
bench tool, but many people, like me, don’t wanna go in there and mess
around with something that’s UL-listed and raided and where there’s big
coils and capacitors full of dangerous AC electricity. So we built a
breakout board where you just plug in an ATX power supply into it and it
brings all the main voltage rails to screw terminals that also have banana
plugs, that accept banana plugs in the top, indicator LEDs so you know each
line is good and it’s fused at 1.25 amps, which we thought was a
respectable amount because it’s comparable to what you would get out of a
TO220 voltage regulator. You know, you can obviously get 30 amps off the 5
volt rail on some power supplies…
Chris: But you probably don’t want to.
Ian: but you short that out and you’re gonna be in a lot of trouble.
Chris: Exactly!
Ian: So we thought the 1.25 amp resettable polyfuse was a safe way to go.
Chris: Yeah.
Ian: And people who want more than that can solder a coat hanger over it or
whatever.
Dave: Yeah, exactly.
Ian: You have the option to go dangerous if you want.
Chris: Well it is Dangerous Prototypes, right?
Ian: Exactly!
Dave: Well, you could have a… voom! Well you could have a jumper on there
labeled, ‘dangerous’, and it just shorts out the fuse, boom, little jumper
lead.
Ian: Engage danger mode.
Dave: Yeah.
Chris: This board is incredibly affordable too. Like people listening
might think, ah well, you know, it’s probably like 20 bucks or something,
it’s like $4, that’s insane. You get an old computer and a $4 board and
you’re ready to go, that’s crazy.
Ian: I think (RAID 0:52:46) now actually it’s coming in at $13.
Chris: Oh! Oh no, I’m looking at the case, sorry. Sorry!
Ian: No, we’re going into cases because we’re trying to put everything into
a standard board size now.
Chris: Ah yeah. Oh that’s right, okay.
Ian: That way’s it’s easier to recycle cases. The Bus Pirate there, there
must be 200 user-designed cases on Thingiverse, on the various sites that
let you put up an open source 3D-printed or laser-cut thing and then buy
one of your own. And we keep changing form factor to fit whatever cheap
case we could find in China, or whatever manufacturers’ case looks cool,
and they’re always so ugly, they’re these ugly, beige cases. So I looked at
all these parts markets when we went on our “Geek Tour”. I was on a
singular quest to find a cool looking project case. You want something
where you can show off your work. Where you can go to your local
hackerspace and say, you know, I made this and let me explain to you how it
works. You don’t wanna hide that in some ugly beige plastic box. So we
set out to do something a little better and make those user cases
recyclable, not just amongst our own projects but for people who want to
use them in their own projects. So we standardized on a set of, I believe,
eleven circuit board sizes. There’s a golden ratio size, a golden ratio
rectangle, as well as just a square size, starting from, I believe, 3 x 3
centimeters, going up to the Eagle CAD free maximum of 10 x 10 or 10 x 80,
I believe, somewhere in there. So we have a footprint library for Eagle,
where, literally, you toss whatever standard board size you want on your
schematic, and then on your board automatically appears the nice board in
the right size, with the nice rounded corners, mounting hole placements in
the correct places, as well as suggested placements for things like USB
mini-B jacks, headers, things like that. Then the idea then is that the
cases that are up online that someone doesn’t (inaudible 0:54:54) for the
Bus Pirate, then you just use the Bus Pirate footprint, which I believe is
the 60 x 37 millimeter golden rectangle, and then if you design your
project on that and use the USB placement or whatever, anything that works
for a Bus Pirate will now work for your project too. And so we’re also…
Dave: I’m gonna have to check this out.
Chris: I was gonna say, Dave can stop complaining, alright. Thank you,
Ian.
Ian: So we’ve got it now only for Eagle but we also have (inaudible
0:55:19) available for Key CAD, and we’re working on getting it available
for more professional suites as well. But most of our users are still in
the hobby or pro-hobby space, so we don’t have a lot of people using Altium
or those really expensive CAD packages you get.
Dave: I’m frantically looking for this enclosure now.
Chris: Dave’s gonna design it by the end of the show.
Ian: The system is called “Sick of Beige”, both for the sort of lewd
innuendo, but also just because really I said, I am fed up and sick of
these beige cases.
Dave: Am I able to… oh, here go, yes, I am able to Google that, “Sick of
Beige”, it’s the first link. Let’s have a look.
Chris: Oh boy! All right, we’ve lost Dave for the rest of the show.
Dave: Sorry!
Chris: Just go on without him.
Dave: Yeah just keep on talking.
Ian: We set out to do… just to start off… I’m not a mechanical designer;
I’m not good at that, that’s not really the thing I like to do. But just
to kick things off, we’ve designed simple laser-cut acrylic cases, you
know, the simple sandwich case, with a plate on the top and a plate on the
bottom, and some stand offs and the small ones come in, I believe, at $3
and the big one, like for the ATX case, $4.
Chris: Yeah.
Ian: So these are very inexpensive to manufacture and to sell.
Chris: That’s great. And I’m sure we’re going to start seeing a lot more
of those just pop up everywhere too because it is…
Ian: I’ve actually seen a surprising number. You know we started off just
to do it for ourselves, so we stopped jumping around and following various
manufacturers’ own preferences and said set our own, and that way if we do
things, using the same basic size, we can recycle the case even amongst our
own stuff. So if we want to injection-mold a case for the Bus Pirate, well
if Bus Pirate version 4, 5, 6, 7 all use that same profile, then our
investment in injection mold is… we can drag that out over some time and
it’s not such a big upfront investment that we don’t recoup over multiple
versions.
Chris: It’ll be crazy when you actually see vendors start matching that too
right. That’ll be the point where you know that you win, when you see…
Ian: That’ll be excellent. For now, I’ve seen it show up on Hack A Day,
I’ve seen it show up on a lot of the projects that users are doing in our
forums, and I didn’t expect that, I really only designed it for us to use
so we’d stop jumping around and torturing our case designers. But I think
some other people are seeing the value in it, if only because it’s one step
to (inaudible 0:57:42) down the thing on your schematic and you get the
board with the nice round corners. You know there’s no work involve in
that.
Chris: Man, that’s how a lot of the best tools come out too. I mean, you
talked really about the Bus Pirate starting like that, the cases starting
like that, you’re looking at some CAD programs, you know that some of them
are probably internal to start with, with companies, and they’re like, oh
well, we should just sell this. Those are how the best tools are made
because it’s made for people that wanna use ’em so, I dunno… I always like
stories like that. I think that’s a good thing.
Ian: The case design especially comes with help of our forum. We enlisted
all of the case designers who had kicked out multiple cases for our
projects and brought them in and said, hey, you’re the mechanical guys,
what would your dream situation be? And we spent probably two or three
months going back and forth and working out the details on this, until it
was something that they were satisfied with. So we really tried to work
with our community of designers to make it as easy on the case designers as
possible.
Dave: I’m looking at these now. Are they just…
Chris: Saw this one coming!
Dave: … clear acrylic sheets? Is that the…?
Ian: Yes, and we do everything…
Dave: So there’s no side panels, it’s just a top, bottom held together with
spaces, is that the idea?
Ian: Yes, yes. It’s just a simple sandwich case. The idea is to keep
fingers out and to keep your board from shorting out on the random screw,
underneath of it on your workbench.
Dave: Right.
Ian: Everything’s done in Google Sketch Up, so it’s a free, though not
open, tool.
Dave: Okay. Yep.
Ian: And we provide a tutorial so that people can customize these to fit
their own projects quite simply. The idea is to make it really easy to use
in your own stuff and then send off the sheets to whoever’s cheap laser
cutting service and have it customized for yourself.
Dave: For my new project, I’ve been thinking about this exact concept
because if you don’t have sides on it, then you don’t need cut-outs for
anything, right. You just have your right angle connectors on your board
and that’s, bingo, you’re done.
Chris: If you don’t have any high voltage.
Ian: Yeah, I agree. I like that concept as well.
Dave: Ah, well, but then you get all dust in there and everything else, so
it’s not, you know, it has trade-offs both ways, but no, it’s good.
Chris: No, you guys do conformal. Ian, do you guys do any conformal (TC
1:00:00) coding or anything like that?
Ian: No, no.
Chris: No, okay. I don’t think there’s any need to but just wondering
because of that.
Ian: In terms of cases, we just hope to get it started and see what would
happen there and also provide a modicum of protection with our otherwise
bare boards.
Chris: Yeah.
Ian: I am so far away from putting something in a proper case or box that I
wouldn’t even be able to tackle that. If we ever case things, it will come
from the community.
Chris: Right.
Ian: Someone will design some awesome case and then we’ll say can we
injection mold that and pay you some money.
Chris: Right.
Ian: I imagine that’s how casing will happen at Dangerous Prototypes.
Chris: Right. I’m guessing you’re probably like me and you have it
dangling from the USB while it’s plugged in. Like dangling there so it
doesn’t touch the…
Ian: Yes, absolutely!
Chris: You know, short out or anything.
Ian: Absolutely!
Chris: That’s the way to do it, man.
Dave: You can buy this kit, right, this case kit, can you see there being a
service where you can also order a custom variation of it? For example,
like I made ten laser-cut holes on the top of this, but I will use your
existing format, but I need ten holes cut in and I need 100 of ’em. Or are
you leaving that up to the individual to take care of that?
Ian: I mean until now, we’ve just left that up to people. We have a
tutorial on how to do it yourself and all of our files are open source, so
you grab our blanks and add your holes wherever you want and send it out.
I don’t really foresee us doing that.
Dave: Right. Sounds like a job for Pinoco or somebody like that.
Ian: Anybody who wants a side business and has a laser cutter is welcome to
take our stock and do that.
Dave: Yeah, exactly, that’s what I was getting at. There’s a business
there for somebody who can… yeah, they can buy these things in bulk and go,
yep, you can use this same size and I’ll laser cut your custom holes for
you.
Chris: They could call it slightly less Dangerous Prototypes!
(laughter)
Dave: We’ve got a question from (Gibbald 1:01:57), great user name, on the
reddit list, when will the Bus Pirate 4 be officially released?
Ian: I love that one!
Dave: Yeah.
Ian: Let me give a little background on it first.
Dave: Yes, please.
Ian: Bus Pirate version 3 uses a PIC24F, along with an FT232 USB to serial
convertor as the interface. Now when I started the Bus pirate, my goal was
to have human scale interaction with chips. Literally, you need to write
the value 255 to register number 1, while you type in 1 space 255 or 0XFF,
or whatever format you wanna type it in, enter, and those values get sent
to the chip. And that was the extent of my planning on the Bus Pirate
hardware when we started version 3. And then, you know, over the years,
and now five years going on that it’s been out and about, I think.
Dave: Wow, five years!
Ian: Probably three years in serious production. People have hacked on and
added so many features, not just user scale stuff, but a binary mode so you
can write a script. It’s supported by flash ROM for programming, little
flash chips in motherboards and things like that. And some of those are
quite huge, I guess, 64-Mbit chip programmed over a serial connection with
all the overhead of a binary protocol, it would take hours on some chips.
So we needed a way to make a faster interface. So Bus Pirate version 4
came up and we used a bigger PIC chip with more pins, four times more
storage space, and most importantly, an integrated USB peripheral.
Dave: Right.
Ian: Now the problem with integrated USB is that you then have to have a
USB driver for it in the chip. Microchip provides that they call a
microchip application library or MAL…
Dave: I can see where this is going.
Ian: … which I like as malware…
Dave: Yep.
Ian: … because it comes with a license clause that says…
Dave: Here we go. Here we go, folks.
Ian: … you can use it freely but you can’t actually include the source when
you distribute it. So we could use their USB drivers with our firmware but
when we wanted to share the source, which is under a public domain license,
we had to keep all the USB stuff separate and pull all of it out and then
just distribute our source. So what good is that for somebody trying to
learn something new and I like Microchip’s products and I like the people
at Microchip, but that license is still…
Dave: But the evil bastards…
Ian: … the stupidest thing they’re doing.
Chris: Yeah.
Ian: They’re trying to get students, people who are used to Arduino to come
aboard and do free demonstrations of their project, which simply amounts to
free publicity and free application notes. But they’re gonna stop a
beginner from a one-click compile over this stupid licensing agreement.
Dave: Yep.
Ian: So at the beginning of this year, we were still using Microchip’s USB
stack, and pulling everything apart, and the developers had their own
version locally and blah, blah, blah. And at this point now, we had a user
come and basically dump upon us a open source USB stack for PIC
microcontrollers. Over the last few months, we’ve worked out most of the
bugs. I think it’s running pretty solidly. I think, the latest firmware
for the Bus Pirate version 4. The USB part is working without problems.
And writing a USB stack is now small thing.
Dave: Of course, yeah.
Ian: I could never have done it myself. It’s not a project I would be
willing to take on. It’s something you’d have to have a passion for doing
it. I know the open AVR one, Luther, you know, someone did it as a senior
project right, or as a university project, it was definitely a labor of
love and it’s high quality code, very well done, and I just don’t think for
a USB stack, I personally would sit down and do that, so I’m totally
indebted to the community that made that happen. So we started off the
year using Microchip’s MAL and now we actually have an open source USB
stack integrated there. The whole code base is available for download.
You can do one-click compile and get into hacking the BUS Pirate version 4
yourself now. So we’ve come a long way, I would say a huge way,
considering the amount of stuff that had to be done to really get this to
be an open source project that I would want to release officially. Now,
there’s still a lot of things that have to be hunted down. There’s still a
lot of things that need to be moved from the old serial interface, to the
new USB interface, and that’s before we even start taking advantage of all
the new speed and opportunities we have with the direct USB connection. So
there’s sort of an instant speed up because we’re still using their USB CDC
ACM, which is their USB to serial convertor class for USB. And so it
doesn’t matter what you set the virtual serial port at, most operating
systems will just give you as much speed as they possibly can. So you
automatically get that speed up with the new Bus Pirate. But in terms of
taking advantage of the double buffering and all the really fancy features
that we have in this open source stack, features I might add that aren’t
available in the Microchip one, that’s gonna take a lot more work. And
especially bringing that to some of the user supplied features, things that
people came and tinkered with and integrated into the code and we accepted…
Chris: And then left.
Ian: … but they’re no longer they’re maintaining.
Chris: Right. Call ’em up and (inaudible 1:07:21) that.
Ian: It’s a huge task; it’s just a huge chore.
Chris: Yeah.
Ian: And I keep telling people version 4 will be ready when we release
firmware version 7. And I have no plan for that. I have no roadmap for
that. I just think that will be the starter pistol when version 4 is
something I would recommend to use in your lab for a project that you
actually have to get done. You know, for now version 3 does everything
version 4 does. It’s been tested 10,000 times in 10,000 labs around the
world. It’s been used in very brutal conditions as well as, you know,
there’s maybe 100,000 of them out there being used in hobby conditions, so
you can be pretty much certain that the Bus Pirate version 3 will do the
right thing for you when you’re trying to figure out why your chip isn’t
working at midnight. Now, if you’re doing version 4 you may be chasing
down bugs that are my fault.
Dave: Right, yes.
Ian: Bugs in the code base, bugs in the compiler, bugs who knows where, and
that’s why I keep telling people version 3, you know, it’s tested, it’s not
the new sweetness, but it’s tested well and it’s still the one we still
highly recommend that everybody go for. But version 4’s great for
developers. It’s like being able to get the new iPhone before it’s
available.
Dave: Yes. But Murphy will get you every time.
Ian: Absolutely!
Dave: So if you use version 4, Murphy’s gonna get you.
Ian: Absolutely!
Chris: It sounds like a call for Amp Hour listeners to come and help
contribute and help Ian with this next firmware release and to jump in on
the project wherever people can.
Ian: Any developers welcome from one line of code to a spellchecked comment
to whatever; we’re just grateful for everyone in our community, and anybody
who wants to joint is more than welcome.
Chris: Yeah. You mentioned SVN.
Dave: Yeah, how do you find that SVN thing works for developing firmware
for an open source product like this? Is there one central person who
goes, no, we’re not gonna include that in the “official” version of the
firmware. How does that all work? Do you find there’s an issue there?
Ian: Well you know everybody’s got their own style on that. Every product
maintainer does their own thing. I believe I have to move to GET, there’s
a lot of pressure to move to GET and I like GET because people can then
push things to you, instead of saying here’s a patch will you apply it, or
will you give me SVN access or whatever, people can just push things in.
And I definitely see the advantage to that. I’m just not ready to move our
whole shop over to it yet. But with SVN, right now (TC 1:10:00) what
happens is we grew pretty organically, it just grew as a community over
time, and I’m just in the habit of giving anyone SVN access who wants it.
Dave: Cool! Right.
Ian: If you want to write an email and say I want SVN access, I give it to
you. I get an email for every commit and I work over it. If it’s
something I have problems with, then I might say can I fix it or someone on
our team fix it. As of yet, no-one who’s committed has committed terrible
code. I haven’t had any problems with chasing people down or kicking code
out but maybe my standards are much lower than some other people. I’m
fairly lax on those things and I’m just happy to have people help out. I’d
much rather have someone help out and clean up their code a little if it’s
not to my style than to lecture people on how their code should be to get
into our repository. That just seems unproductive on everyone’s part. So
we’re pretty open.
Dave: Yeah. When I did my watch, my scientific calculator watch, I
released the source code out there under open source and I had somebody
basically re-write the entire thing. Like they just didn’t like the way I
did it so they re-wrote it from scratch and they… well almost, and they
just coded it in a completely different direction to what I was happy with.
But in the end, their code was hugely feature rich and much more capable
than what my code was but it just… they completely re-did it, just in their
own style because they didn’t like mine. So I imagine that sort of thing
can happen.
Ian: Were you happy with that?
Dave: Well I was happy with all the features that he added, and I ended up
actually selling the unit with that firmware, of course because it had all
the cool features; you could play chess on it and you could do all sorts of
stuff. But in terms of the code, I couldn’t follow it anymore because it
was just completely different to the coding style that I was used to
personally and I just couldn’t maintain it myself after that.
Ian: I think it’s great that you went ahead of used it, and I was just
going to say did you even host it, but obviously if you put it to a
product…
Dave: Oh no, of course, yeah.
Ian: … you had full on.
Dave: Yeah but then it got to a point where I couldn’t maintain it anymore
because I had no idea what he was doing, which is good and a bad thing; he
did all the hard work, which I’m very grateful for and it was great
firmware, it’s just that I couldn’t… it had the side effect of me not being
able to maintain it personally anymore.
Ian: I 100% agree with that. We had the exact same problem.
Dave: Yeah because I’m not a huge C-coder. I can write in C and I’ve got
my own little style, but apparently, it’s totally different to what all the
professional code monkeys out there do. They took offence to my style and
went, oh no, this amateur hour, you know.
Chris: Wait ’til they get a load of me, buddy!
Dave: Yeah. Said in your best (inaudible 1:13:6) voice.
Ian: We had the exact same problem. We have fairly advanced features that
people have added to the code base at times, and then when we do something
and someone reports a problem, especially when we have a cool feature, but
no-one really explored it at the outer limits, and then we get someone who
says, well they’ve done it up to here but I wanna do it at 100 megahertz.
I said well, you know, I doubt it’s gonna work.
Chris: Yeah.
Dave: Because if you wanna do that, you’ll have to change the whole
underlying infrastructure or something.
Ian: Yes. So then I’m in the code and the guts of it trying to figure out
exactly what’s going on and how I would re-write it and whether we can
actually get to this point. And I would definitely say that’s certainly a
danger with open source, there’s certainly the danger of losing control of
your code base. In my mind, I can picture the grey areas in three or four
projects, which I know are both things people have done that worked great
in the beginning, but have, over time, not aged well or kept up as well,
and are now becoming problematic. And it’s on my ‘to do’ list to get in
there and re-write all of that and re-do it so that it’s not a problem for
our users.
Chris: Do you consider it your… I guess a larger question is how much of
this do you see as yours versus community. I’ve never open-sourced a
project myself so I don’ know, but I assume that some of it is hard to push
it out there and just be like, well whatever, right because it’s also a
business, so where is that line drawn for you?
Ian: I’m fortunate enough, I’ve never had that issue.
Chris: Yeah. That’s good.
Ian: For me, the code belongs to the community. The code belongs to
everyone. Public domain means I don’t claim any rights on it at all. And
when people contribute generally, especially if it’s a public domain
project because there’s technically no license, we actually have to have
them fill out a little form or send an email saying they’re dedicating this
code to the public domain.
Chris: How interesting.
Ian: And if they’re in a country that doesn’t allow that, like Germany,
there’s actually a contract they have to sign off on…
Chris: Oh wow!
Ian: … that says that they’re transferring the code to me and then I can
release it into public domain.
Chris: Goodness, do they send you a piece of mail and you make a little
paper airplane, you throw it off the roof or something?
Ian: All this licensing stuff it’s really just a formality and it’s a huge
pain. In my opinion, public domain should be the default.
Chris: Yeah.
Ian: If you put something down and you don’t say it’s copyright, if you
draw something and you don’t put copyright on it, if you code something and
you don’t put copyright on it, then it should be public domain. People
should feel free to use it however, but that’s not the way of the world.
Dave: Unfortunately, legally that’s not the case because lawyers…
Ian: Absolutely, it’s the opposite. And so we run into the situation, in
order to not claim rights on something we have to jump through all these
hoops.
Chris: So weird.
Ian: So I see the code base as belonging to everyone. I generally know
which parts I’ve written and I know other people’s code when I run into it.
But I’d say the code belongs to the community, the user base, and the
people who maintain it. And people, of course, are welcome to take it and
fork it and use it on their own and call it their own for all I care.
Chris: Yeah. Interesting! Phew! Well there’s one last topic, I wanted to
ask about the 7400 series competition.
Ian: Oh yeah.
Chris: What was your final take on it, what was your favorite?
Ian: Oh it’s so hard to have a favorite. We’ve done it for two years now
and it’s a competition to see who can build really the most interesting,
creative, wacky, odd, whatever, using 7400 discreet logic chips, and it
really will take any logic chip. We always say we’ll leave it to the
judges. So if you wanted to use the CPLD…
Dave: No, no, no.
Ian: … but it’s still consistent with the spirit of the 7400…
Dave: (inaudible 1:16:49)
Ian: Well if you use 7400 logic and mix it with CPLD or do something
innovative and it still reflects the nature of the contest and the spirit
of the competition, I tell people that’s fine. It doesn’t mean you’ll get
first place, but anybody’s welcome to submit anything innovative based on
discreet logic. And this is the second year now, Dave judged last year.
This year we had a pool of community judges, as well as a forum voting.
There’s one guy who makes really incredible projects. Last year he was the
grand prize winner, and this year he did a RFID card, made entirely from
discreet logic. I thought that was cool, not just because doing all that
work with the discreet logic, but because by looking at the design, I
understood more about how RFID works than any other RFID project I’ve been
involved in. I’ve made PIC tag readers, PIC tag clones, stuff like that,
but just looking at the layout of that and seeing how he did that, it was
just mind blowing.
Chris: Yeah.
Ian: That’s what I like about the 7400 competitions. You see these things
that we now do with the microcontroller reduced to the discreet logic
components and then you can sort of see how it would happen, and I find
that really fascinating. And this contest, I would love to take credit for
it, but it’s actually Squeaky Beaver, one of our community members, came up
with it last year and did all of the heavy lifting last year to get it off
the ground, so he definitely deserves credit for the creative side of that.
Chris: Yeah.
Ian: Now this year was quite good as well, but I think doing a yearly 7400
contest is difficult because you run out of the obvious projects; you’re
getting into some really, really serious work, which is very cool as well
but…
Chris: Right, shakes the pool up.
Ian: Yeah, exactly. So I think we’re gonna put it on hiatus for a few
years and come up with some contests in the interim. And one that came out
of the forum that I’m particularly fond of and I’m sure it’s gonna be our
next competition is lab equipment with no specific definition.
Chris: Okay.
Ian: Just make some useful lab tool.
Chris: Oh yeah, that’ll be like the (swan of DIY 1:19:10).
Dave: I’ll write that, yeah, yeah.
Ian: With the effort, the creative energy and the engineering that’s going
towards something maybe useful for everyone and the community, instead of
just some simple learning demo project oddity, we’re actually starting to
get a body of open source tools.
Chris: Yeah. So you name end product as the goal instead of the
ingredients?
Ian: Yes.
Chris: Hah! That’s a great idea, I like it.
Dave: Hmmm.
Ian: so I think that would…
Dave: And I would weight that one the more universally useful it is the
higher it would be ranked; that’s how I’d run that one.
Ian: Oh yeah, absolutely.
Dave: Because yeah, you could someone to do something really obscure, so
obscure it’s really cool, but it’s so obscure that nobody else would ever
wanna make it ever.
Chris: Right.
Ian: (laughs)
Dave: It’s such a specific use (TC 1:20:00).
Chris: Right. This testament flies, take a crap!
(laughter)
Dave: That’s a great idea.
Chris: And just on the commodity side too, seeing what commodity equipment
now can do, it’ll probably have some test-the-measurement companies perk up
a little bit I’m sure.
Ian: Right. And I would love to build and sell a test batch of the things,
both from the 7400 contest, or a lab equipment contest or whatever. And
people suggested it but my feeling is I don’t wanna infringe on anyone’s
project. I don’t want anyone to feel like I’m taking something from them
or capitalizing on that. So I’ve been very, very hesitant.
Dave: Yeah, that’s tough.
Ian: But I think next time we may offer the winner the option…
Dave: Yeah, for a test batch.
Ian: … to have a test batch done.
Dave: Yeah, I would do that. Yes, you have the option to get it assembled
and we’ll take care of it all for you and cut you in on the profit.
Ian: Yeah, absolutely! But even with a licensing deal, I’m just so nervous
and so scared about getting someone upset and appearing to use someone’s
project in that way. I’ve been in that space, people have cloned work I’ve
done and it’s made me really nervous, especially when you’re just getting
started. You don’t have the resilience to say yeah people have been
cloning my stuff for years now and it’s really done nothing but help me.
Chris: Really!
Ian: In the beginning it’s nerve-racking. You know you have that knee-jerk
reaction and say oh no, this is gonna ruin me, gonna take me down, or
they’re getting all this credit off of something I’ve done. And I would
never want to give anyone else that feeling. But I really would like to
offer the option of having a test batch made, especially if we come up with
some really cool test tools.
Dave: Ian from Dangerous Prototypes, without a last name.
Ian: Of course.
Dave: Thank you very much for joining us. I think our capacity is well and
truly up here.
Chris: Definitely.
Ian: Well thank you, guys, for having me, it was really nice to talk to you
and I know we’ve been working on this for a while to get all the times
lined up and I’m glad we finally did it. It was a lot of fun.
Chris: I agree.
Dave: It was indeed. Thank you very much. Where can people catch you?
Ian: I’m available at dangerousprototypes.com. I’m @dangerousproto on
Twitter. I do tweet. Watch out there’s some tweets about food there that
seem to upset people. Our blog has six to ten posts a day. All user
projects or stuff we’re working on, and of course, if you wanna get
involved in our projects, our hardware, our forum’s always open. 24 hours
a day you can get a hold of somebody on the forum almost immediately.
There’s a great community there and they’re always working on projects;
they’re always hacking something, debugging something, or fixing something.
Chris: That’s awesome. Well, thank you again, Ian. It was great talking
to you.
Ian: Thank you, guys. Thank you so much.
Dave: Catch you later.
(TC 1:22:44)