MEP EP#68: Sonic Massage

Podcast Transcript

Host 3     00:11

Hello, and welcome to the macro fab engineering podcast. We're your hosts, Parker, Dolman and Steven Craig. This is episode number 68. Hey, listeners, if you enjoy the map, please let others know about us. Tell your co workers, your friends, your family loved ones and share it on social media at macro fab or follow us on Facebook. And we have an Instagram. Yes, Iris, our marketing. One of our marketing team members is here today to kind of help us remember things like this. So what's our handle on Instagram? Is that at McAfee Inc. Oh, that's what we got wrong last week. Okay, ADNEC. fedlink is Instagram. So at some point during the show, we're going to announce a secret code word. We don't know what that code word. We never know what it is until we get to it. So once you hear the secret code word, which we will announce if you want to email us your address and the code word at podcast at macro fab.com. We'll send you some sweet macro fab swag. Yeah. So we've been we've we've already been getting that swag out to people. Because we've been running the the secret code word for a couple episodes now and people are starting to receive everything. Yeah, I think we've been doing it for six episodes or something like that. Yeah. We're starting to see people tweet out their their sweet koozies. Yes. It actually a couple of them gone overseas as well. Yeah. So Parker, what's been up this week? So the Particle Photon IoT work stuff that I've been working on? Yeah, we talked about that last time. Yes. And it's a continuation of the hacker days. Like Internet of useful thing challenge. Yeah. And so I've basically been laying the hardware groundwork for the compressor IoT that I want to do. So I basically, I, earlier this week, I picked a whole suite of like, sensors I wanted to use and how I was going to interface with the compressor and basically wrote up a little design doc and started you know, laying down parts today. Nice. So the vibration sensing and I guess, I guess, magnitude as well. I want to use it for bike how aggressive it's vibrating? Sure. I'm going to use the ls M, nine d s one. It's a little bit overkill for what I need. Because also has like It's like a It's a six degree of freedom. That a MEMS Yeah, it's a MEMS. Okay, who makes it? S t, if I remember correctly, okay. But it's a little overkill, because got built in magnetometer. And I don't need that. It's the sixth degree of freedom. I just needed the accelerometer. But I chose this one because there's already examples out there of code to get the work with the, you know, particle photon. Yeah. So Mike, it's easy. Yeah. How much does that cost? A couple bucks. Yeah, it's a couple bucks. I think it's like $5. Okay, so it's not super cheap, but it's not terrible. No, like a $20. Sensor? No, it's not too bad. I do have a $20 sensor on here, though. Really? Yeah. We'll get to that in just a bit. What else you slapping on a MEMS microphone? Okay, it's that way it's gonna vibrate, and you're going to listen to it vibrate? Yeah, I figured if I could also listen to it, I could figure out easier. Like, if it's the compressor running, or if it's the air, water, blow off valve. Okay, you're gonna just analyze it and make decisions based off of what you say, yeah, what frequencies I'm seeing. And I kind of wanted the sound there too, just to see if, like, I can detect, you know, maybe the frequency shifts as as oil gets older, or as it wears in more. You know, who knows? Yeah, be interesting to see that. And that's something that expensive advice. That's like a 50 cent part plus an op amp. And it's just a surface mount part that she slapped on the border. Okay. Yeah, it's a it's a mens style basis. A diaphragm made of silicone, like a QA fn package or something. No, it's It's a weird, Pat. It's almost like a metal tin crystal with a hole in it. Okay. Yeah, I've seen a handful. Yeah. So I got one of those on the board. And then for temperature sensing. I'm not doing it the right way. I guess cuz I'm just using a board mount sensor. This is just the measure ambient temp I guess. And then using the TI TMP 102, which is very low cost board mount sensor. The good thing about all while at least mostly sensors is they're all i square c. So I saw one bus, it makes it super easy. Now of course the MEMS microphone is not i square c. So I'm that's just on the analog greed, though. What's your process? Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah, it's the photo. Whatever the photo. So wait, it has a couple add on or something. Yeah, it's got, um, I think actually like eight channels 10 bit eight bit.

Host 3     05:10

Enough bit. Probably 10 Yeah, probably 10 It's enough for my mic. Yeah, well, you're only gonna be using one of them. Right? Yeah. Two pins. Actually. Two ad DS. Yeah. What? Okay, so you got the microphone on one. What do you got on the other pressure transducer? Ooh, this. This is measuring all of these different things. I can No. I mean, it's IoT thing. It's, it can do anything, right. Internet of excessively useful thing excessively easily. Yes, yes. So let's say the pressure transducers a PX three A N, two b s 250 P ax. It's a mouthful. Remember that for the exam? Exactly. For me mean would make that the code word. And you had to spell it correctly. That's brutal. We're not doing that is not the code word. But it's like a as a eighth inch NPT fitting on the end. So you can screw into the I basically want to take the gauge off the compressor and put a tee, put the gauge back on and then screw this in. That way, I can just see how you know how much it cycles in terms of pressure drop, and see if I can say if I can see a leak happening on like, a weekend or something. Okay, that's kind of I want to see I got that. And then the control the compressor, I'm going to use a solid state relay. And I found one that be controlled with a 3.3 volt signal. And that is a 6225 a XXSZS? DC three? That one? Yeah, there's a lot of a lot of letters there. And that's what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna have a, the 3.3 volt signal come out of the box, I'm gonna go through like a 10 Ohm resistor, just, you know, protect Particle Photon just a little bit. And it's just gonna go right into the SSR. So the SSR shuts down the machine? A Yes, it will shut machine down, it won't be able to turn it on, how does it How does it shut it down? So there's a switch on the front of the compressor that basically is in series with the switch that turns on via pressure. Oh, okay. So it's got a mechanical reed switch, basically, that when the diaphragm is, it has enough pressure in the tank that stretches the diaphragm out. And so it'll turn on that, and then the, the power goes into a toggle switch that's on the front of the compressor. And then I'll go into this SSR. And then onto the motor. Is this a DC SSR? is AC. Okay, so the AC is on the switch? Yes. Okay, so then you're fine. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, cuz I ran into an issue with DC and AC SSRS. Not that long ago, where I had a whole project with a bunch of AC SSRS. And then I realized that they don't switch DC, or they sort of they switch it on, and then switch it off. There's certain suicide switches. That's right. Well, and that's what I was wondering if you were going to take this SSR and just put it across the mains, such that if it detected something, it just exploded them. It'll be able to turn off and on. Yeah, but yeah, it will be it's more of a engage disengage or arm disarm. Sure, sir. Sure, because it can't actually turned the compressor on, because that's all up on to the actual mechanical pressure switch, which is probably better to do it that way. So it's still somewhat safe. Yes. Yeah. Well, it's as the manufacturer intended, right. I but I wouldn't want to the pressure switch. They know what they're doing. They know that it's UL listed. Right. So how are you powering the photon? Is it leaching? I could do that. I'm just gonna put like a USB plug on it. And then a wall wart. Plugging into the wall. Yeah, plug in the wall. Come on, and be so cool to suck off power off vampire off the mains? Well, then, that would mean I pull the power, high voltage out of the compressor box into my box. And I kind of want to make sure you're keeping everything set. I got Yeah, I want to low voltage only, you know, okay. Yeah. So you just have to plug your box into the wall. And it's not too bad. There's already a plug there for the blow off. So yeah, it's not too big a deal. Cool. So Steven, earlier this week? Yes. We did a Facebook live thing. We did a Facebook live thing. And this has been a long time coming. But we finally calibrated the space echo. Yeah. And it was just a piece of felt.

Host 3     09:53

Wait, is that the code word piece of felt piece of felt? Felt is the code word. And this one actually has some significance. Yeah, because Okay, so we we actually finished working on the SpaceX months ago. Yeah, in terms in terms of actually getting all the components fixed on it. And we turn it on, and it sort of doesn't work. Sort of meaning as in, we were able to get something out of it. But clearly, it's not doing what it's supposed to do. Yeah. So we established this Facebook Live thing that we we did on Tuesday, where we basically just did a live calibration of the space, the space echo, and one of the one of the reasons why we did that kind of worked in favor because we just got a really killer DMM that we borrowed from Keithley, seven and a half digit DMM. So we were kind of doing them in parallel with playing around with the DMM. And we could use that to calibrate even though it's funny, we only used it for one thing, one measurement, one measurement and and even better than that the measurement wasn't measured this voltage it was just make sure that this voltage is lower than a number lower than that it doesn't say were lower it just lower, lower. So it's like it's killing. It's killing a mosquito with a boulder. Yeah. situation and all the other measurements we had to make or calibrations were basically we put in white noise and a very small known noise signal, right. And then you disconnect the inputs. Right, so it doesn't do anything. It's pulling on the power supply, though. Yeah. It's pulling drag on the power supply. Right? Yeah, it's dragging. Okay, so the reason why the code word is piece of felt, is because when we turn the device on probably I think this was like the first 10 minutes. Yeah, we noticed that the tape was kind of slack on the on the tape. Yeah, that that's an ain't gonna work. So figuring out why it's slick. And Parker goes and just pushes on the little piece of felt it's a piece of felt that tensioner and the tape pulls none. And the speaker started this and it just started echoing and it's like, oh, my god, are you kidding? And all it was was a set screw adjustment to move this little piece of fill that presses on the tape, mechanical adjustments or calibration? They are they are in effect the the service manual called for these kinds of calibrations. Yeah, in fact, we only actually technically did the electrical calibration. The whole section before what we had was the mechanical calibration. Yeah, we eyeballed the the pickups. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. the read write heads. The Asmath of the heads. That's actually what they they haven't done the service manual effectively. Just make it flat. Yeah. Make it parallel to the n square to the tape. Yeah. So So basically, we do this one thing, and it just starts echoing it's not perfect. So we still had to do some calibration. Yeah, but it was one fix was 98% of it. Yeah. And a lot actually. 1.8% of that last of it. was we had the break the taping, right? You just let it run. And it actually echoes better after I guess the tape gets banged magnetically used. Yeah. So something I don't know. Maybe maybe it's just the sound massages the the particles? Yeah, basically what is Yeah, that's exactly right. Yeah. See, you're starting to turn into an audio guy. Now. You hire audio misuse. sonically massage, sonically massage, that, I wish that was the code word. Let's just make that the title yet. Sonic massage is the title piece of film is the code. So yeah, this space echo is working. We have a little bit of cosmetic work to do. Gosh, a long time ago, Parker had an aluminum faceplate machine for it. And we still have to put that on there. And then the knobs for this are actually sitting in my apartment right now. So I gotta go and get those and clean them too. Yeah, probably. We cleaned everything else might as well clean clean. And the thing that you see lunch Yeah, and touch. Yeah. Yeah. How know that. Actually, we should just leave that dirty. Just just because Yeah. Oh, we're just getting dirty here. Yeah. Oh, there we go. So we'll probably have an update. I think we have a guest next week. Yes. So we'll have an update two weeks in the future. Well, yeah, everything's everything is in the future two weeks. Cool. So I also we talked about this last podcast, but I think

Host 3     14:34

We hadn't completed we hadn't completed it on Friday after the podcast. That's right. So we did the voltage calibration on my Kron height 501 J, which is a voltage standard. Yeah. And it's really awesome. Now, it is ridiculously accurate. Now, in most cases, for for each voltage selection range, I am less than a micro volt offset when most of the the service manual calls for, like plus minus 15 to 20 micro volts. Um, yeah, I mean, the Nano volt range. Yeah. For each one of those, it's the best was the tweet that we put out where you powered on 10 volts. And you're like, oh, yeah, well, we powered on on 10. And the meter just goes 9.99999 And it just keeps going down. Yeah, it's fantastic. So yeah, the voltage standard is complete. And I'm going to be using that to calibrate the synthesizer. So all of this kind of goes into one giant soup that you know comes together, which the synth we will eventually play through the space echo, so we can hear all of that. But since my synth responds to a control voltage of zero to 10 volts for the input where zero is 13.75 hertz and 10 volts is 14,000 and some change Hertz. I wanted a very accurate input voltage, such that I could calibrate my synth, but now that I have my voltage standard, which was calibrated from an DMM that's really good. Now it cascades down. And I can actually calibrate myself, though. Yeah. And speaking of the synthesizer, that's right, you have an update

Host 3     16:24

You're gonna be playing some tunes, right. A bunch of warbles in portables because you only have only one section working right? Yeah, yeah, I only only have one section. It's the VCO. Right. Yeah. So the the VCO is partially complete right now. So this is kind of the first initial prototype demo of the synthesizer. So what is the VCO voltage controlled oscillator? i What can you give a quick rundown of how that works? Sure. So in theory of operation in this particular model, I'll break it down as as high level as possible. I have 80 Mega 328 P, basically running Arduino, and it dumps out to a DDS sensitive synth chip, which basically is just a clock divider that you can write a digital signal to. And then that drives an analog sawtooth generator. Okay. And from that cell to generator, I can go in and then using a couple math operators, I can hack and chop that into different sounds. And you're doing all the math operators in op amps, and op amps, competitors, handful of Tris transistors and things. So it's, it's simple things. It's like, compare. If you compare a sawtooth wave, you get a pulse. Yep. If you if you do the absolute value of a sawtooth wave, you get a triangle wave. If you do some other fancy stuff to a triangle wave using some diode breakpoints, you can get a sine wave. So just a couple of different analog operators, and you get a bunch of different waves available. So this oscillator real quick, let me pull up some noise on it. So right now we're listening to a sine wave. So in this demo, I have control over the pitch. And that swings from what, 14 Hertz to 14 kilohertz. Yeah, so Okay, so actually, the the oscillator, the input to the oscillator is a zero to 10 volt, or zero to five volt actually wave. But what I basically have is just a potentiometer, that acts as a voltage divider. So turning the pot all the way low, right now is zero volts into my ad, and that is equivalent to about 14 Hertz. Okay. And then if I swung it all the way, the other way, that's about 14,000, and some change. And then anywhere in between. So this is just a good old fashioned sine wave. Nothing too special there. Yeah. So I can change my selector to a triangle wave. Now. A triangle wave is effectively a sonically it's really close to a sine wave. It just has a little bit more edge to it, because it has those sharp breakpoints. Yeah, well, you get a, you get a high frequency noise at when it breaks over. That's right. Yeah. And in fact, there's a little bit of oscillation in this really high frequency oscillation. If you put if you put this triangle on to a Scylla scope, you'll see a bunch of extra crap at the breakpoint, but it's so high frequency, you can hear it. Wow. Okay, great. That's the triangle wave. The next one is a sawtooth wave, which is way more aggressive, really buzzy, because it has a a much sharper cut off. Yeah. So once the the sawtooth wave reaches its maximum point It has to, as quickly as possible jump down to the lowest point, that's where you get all that extra high frequency sound from. So these are these three that we've listened to right here all in fact, I'll change

Host 3     20:18

So that's a sawtooth wave, these these three waves, sine wave, triangle wave, and sawtooth wave, I consider to be more of the softer, quote, waves, they have a little bit more of just a smoother characteristic minus maybe the sawtooth wave, most of the other ones are a bit more aggressive. There. So once again, sawtooth wave, the next wave is actually kind of a mixture. This is called a Super Saw wave, which I believe was coined by Roland, I can't remember exactly who did it originally. But it's what you do is you take a swollen the synthesizer comm. Right? Or keyboard manufacturer? Yeah. So what you do is you basically take a sine wave, you phase shift it, you then add some voltage to it, DC voltage to it, and then you combine that mixed with a sawtooth wave. So you get some aspects of the sawtooth and some aspects of the sine wave. So

Host 3     21:27

It's a little bit more aggressive than the than the sawtooth wave. Wow. All right. Yeah. So there's, there's two more waves that are available on my synth. The next one is a pulse wave, this one is going to be your fundamental frequency plus everything else, the way a regular rectangular pulse should be. And this is your more like Nintendo Wii, digital sound to it, this and the Sol is what you get on a window. That's right. That's right. And you actually get a lot of triangle too. But digital triangles don't sound like analog triangles, they're there. They're always more buzzy. Yeah. So just a regular old pulse wave here. But in in this sense, I can actually control the pulse width. So this is about 10%, pulse width, positive. And then as you swing all the way over, you get about 90%. And then if you jump in between them, you can get kind of that sweepy. So yeah. And this is me, actually moving a potential ometer with my hand right now, I do have inputs for a low frequency oscillator, such that you can control the pulse width with another wave. Yeah. And we will add that in later on. So the last wave is actually not functional at the moment, I'll have that going in the future. But it's called an animator wave, which is basically a sawtooth wave that is you get multiple copies, you face shift them, and then you add them together. And it just becomes this huge cacophony of like, ridiculous sound. It's the coolest one. And I wish it was working right now, but it is it is not. So um, in addition to whatever wave is my fundamental that I'm playing, I actually also have a sub oscillator that I can add in. So right now we're just purely hearing a sub oscillator at one octave below the fundamental, and then that's adding in the the fundamental. So right now I'm playing a sawtooth wave on top and a sub octave, which is just a square wave beneath

Host 3     23:55

Them, I also have the ability to drop the two octave. I'm sorry, that was two octaves lower. This is one octave low. Yeah, I had that I had that set wrong. So there's there's one octave below fundamental. So I can change the relative mix of the two, this is just purely fundamental. And this is just purely subjective. And I can change the waveform waveform of whatever's on top.

Host 3     24:43

So that's what I got going so far on this. And so what's the next step? There's a lot of next steps available. Next update, we're gonna have the next update, I will have the rest of the VCO complete, so I will actually have MIDI control. So we can actually have a keyboard and play something that's not just the whole thing. Just sweeps all over the place. And then I will have the animator up and running. And I will also have all the LFO with the low frequency oscillator inputs. Basically, I'm going to complete the entire VCO and have that such that we can have all the control over it. Awesome. Very cool. Yep. Awesome. Alright, so we are going to have a new section. That's right, called the pow. And this is actually our friends Pat idea. It's product of the week, or was it part of the week? Yeah. Or project of the project of the week? It can be whatever we want it to be as long as it. That's the catch all? Yeah, it's not technically an RFO. No, it's on RFO. And this is gonna be kind of a slight jab to ourselves with another project. I found a even better op amp. Oh, for the super simple power supply. No. Yeah. The Opa? 549 is like, like, so you were using the FIFO? One? That's right. And that was like, the, the the hot dog, right? This is like the hot dog of 2015. Because that's when we search for the 541. And it all spawned off of going to Mouser. And just looking for the craziest op amp. We could find it. So I guess they've created a better one now. Yeah, it's even. Again, it's the brought worse, it's bigger. It is a high voltage, high current op amp. There's so many good words for code words. But the crazy thing about this is it does eight amps continuous? Just three more than the old op amp that right? Because it was five, and it does 60 volts instead of 40. Wow. Yeah, we need to use the side instead. If we use so if we use the OPA five for one. Yeah, the power supply is already obsolete. That's kind of sad. That makes me sad, because we haven't finished that. So we got the upgrade was Yeah, we were already obsolete. And so in in singles. It's $23. Yeah, we're 23 almost double the price. No, I think the other ones were $20. More. Thank you Sure. I thought it was about $14. I don't I remember 20. But it was so long ago. What kind of package does this come in? Same big, hunky. Okay, our package. This is one of those ones that looks like if you took a to 220 and you stretch it and gave it a bunch more pins. Yeah. Yeah, it looks like one of those and gave it a beer belly and all that stuff. Yeah, but 860 volts. That's even more heat we got to get rid of Yeah. And well, it's, it does, I think 10 amps peak for a very short period of time. Okay, so what the five four ones did 10 At peak two? Yes. But it was only five amp continuous. Right? These do eight amp continuous? Well, and that's why we did we had two op amps in parallel such that we could do 10 amp continuous. So this would be two of these in parallel. So you can do 16 amps. Actually, I would use two of these but still spec it at 10. Okay, yeah. So you're not like running them? Oh, with the five four ones. We were balls to the walls. You just ran them at max voltage. Yeah. And they worked. Yeah, they were they were doing these. So with these is we can run even higher voltage, we can actually do 120 volt sine wave. With two of these in series, or in parallel, we still need to get the 170 volt for RMS though true, but we're getting there. If we have a DC power supply that couldn't be switched to just straight output mains voltage. That would be awesome. Gotta wait for the What the? This is the 549 by the time I don't know the 556 comes like five six or something. It'll it'll be like 30 amp with 200 volt continuous and you're in that small package? No. Okay, onto the RFO Yeah. So this week we have the juice zero by SparkFun. Google lens lets smartphone cameras understand what they see and take action by TechCrunch. And then we have robot lives in your garden eats weeds found on Hackaday so juice zero. Can you guess what this is about? Yeah, we talked about this one already. Well, I was the juice, juice juice arrow.

Host 3     29:37

This is the juice 00 So basically SparkFun made a DIY version of the press out of out of artists and cardboard. Oh, how much did it cost servo when they I think it was just a goofy video they made but and took the juice packages. They basically use Capri Sun. No yeah, that's all he's resigned. And they basically pre, you know, poked it with the straw. I wonder if they saw that one guy's comment about he's been hacking Capri Sun since he was I'm fine. I'm thinking that's where the inspiration came from. Yeah. And basically they take the free sun and stick it upside down and then they close the lid. And they have a big, no arcade button on the side that you press. And it goes. And it squeezes. That's amazing. Yeah. We got the we have the link up for it. YouTube link. Yeah, it's a very good. A good sucker punch, I guess. Yeah, because the video is really well made. And it uses all the, it uses all the like

Host 3     30:52

The words and uses all of them all the word everyone. Yes. Everyone always makes good videos, their video, their production quality is pretty high. buzzwords, that's the buzzword. It uses all those like how how startups describe their business and stuff like that. Oh, the whatever the original one that juice zero or whatever. It was incredible. Especially the the letter that the CEO wrote. It was just wank city. Absolutely city, defending his, his bag squeezer. All the Weinke. Okay, next one, the Google lens, which is came out of the Google I O conference. Basically, you can I guess it's gonna be an update to Google phones or whatever. Maybe my pixel will get it? I have no idea. Basically, it's, you point the camera at something, and it will tell you what it is. They have there some kind of image recognition, image recognition with some Google AI, or they call it AI technology? Sure. I was thinking you might be able to get the same result, though, if you like, took a picture. And then Mechanical Turk did out. So you had like, you know, 10,000 people in like India, look at the picture and figure out what it is, and then send it back to you. That's messed up. That's what Mechanical Turk is, I guess. And you can like actually just spin up a Mechanical Turk on Amazon, you see, what Google is probably going to do is just take a picture of everything. Just eventually, they will have a database that has images from every angle of everything. And then it just looks whatever that up. Yeah, it just, I don't know, whatever compares images and be like, Okay, I know what that is. That's actually one thing they were doing with the camera is using GPS data and what your camera sees. It can figure out basically like, what story you're looking at, and overlay reviews and the recipe and that recipe. Menus, if it's like a restaurant and that kind of stuff. Yeah, a store hours, kind of like augmented reality, we'll have something like some kind of like, huge video about that. I don't know, like, six, seven years ago with the guy who wore like a projector thing on his chest. And, you know, when he would walk up to his friend, it would project onto a wall be like, this is Tom. And he shows Facebook wall. And I thought that was just the Google Glass. Was that the origins of Google? Yeah, but it was called something else. I don't remember what it was. Yeah, but it but it sounds like the evolution of that style. Yeah. And I think this is going to be a lot more beneficial than Google Glass. Because Google Glass pretty much did the same thing. Yeah, except this is on your phone. It seems that people are more accepting of this kind of technology in your phone first, like wearing it on your eyeball. Okay. Have you really interacted with many people wearing Google Glass? Yes. Thoughts? What are your thoughts on that? It's really goofy looking. Okay. I had, there was one night I went to a bar with stop looking at it. Well, it's not that I couldn't stop looking at it. He couldn't stop looking at it. And the problem was like, he was just like, constantly surfing or doing whatever he was doing. And it would be awkward because I'd be conversing with them. And then I'd realize, oh, he hasn't paid attention, or he's gonna last like 10 minutes watching the latest cat video. Yeah, probably something like that. It was It was horrible for like, human interaction. Absolutely terrible. And I don't know, I don't want to I don't want to crap on it too much. Because it's cool. But at the same time, I was like, no, stop. You gotta get used to it, man. Yeah, gonna cuz it's coming. Yeah, it's like that. Um, there's that video, the Augmented Reality video where where it's a guy's life and he's like, walking down the street. And it's like ads are popping in that kind of stuff. And it gets to the end. He's like walking down the grocery store, and everything's so nice looking. And then like The augmented reality program crashes and he's just like in a it's just a dome dungeon. Yeah, area and like, everything's really sketchy looking. And then like, someone pops in he goes, Don't worry, we're rebooting your experience. Like, huh, yeah. Or like that Futurama episode where they all go into the web? Oh, like way back. Yeah, sorry, season Warner but they're getting attacked by ads and they have to like kick and punch was awesome. I wish it was that way. Oh, you attack the ads? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you can real life with Adblock. No, like, ball. I'm thinking like billboards. Oh, man from Houston attacks billboard. Next

Host 3     35:49

Robot lives in your garden eats weeds found on Hackaday This is from a new company that I haven't heard about called Franklin robotics. They don't have someone named Franklin. Okay, in their story behind that. I don't know the story behind the name. Basically, it's a bunch of ex employees from iRobot. Okay, so I Robot. Yes, I Robot. They make their own Roombas and stuff like that. Sure. And the robots name is turtle. So like turtle until yet for guarding? Yeah, got it? Yeah. Yeah. It has all the words. It has all the word. Oh, has all the words. Yeah, everyone. It's basically it's a it's a robot. It's a Roomba for your garden. Yeah, it said it has tank treads instead nice. And it goes around. And if it finds a plant that's below it's like, it basically assumes if it's a weed, if it's below a certain height, can you set that? I don't think so with their prototype. Alright. Because you can't buy this yet. It's just like, I think they're trying to get funding or whatever, okay. But it basically has a weed whacker underneath it. So if it finds a, a plant that's short enough, it just drives over and then turns on the weed whacker and chops it up. That's driving me Yeah. And so yeah, it basically is a really good way at least if you got to start with no weeds. Right? So when they finally start growing up it chops them down. Yeah, cuz if you put this in someone's garden right when they plant stuff it just goes and just oh no no rips through Oh no. So they tell you basically put like little protectors around that make your your your plants that are not that you want to keep protected until they grow big enough and the thing can't run it I can just see it it's just mayhem. Bad bad must kill to kill us kill all green to high must kill. You go on vacation come back in your whole lawn is just on fire. But it's solar powered. So it just basically when it's done. It just sits there and recharges pretty cool. That's neat. Yeah. Can you like define boundaries of what your yard is? It probably works like a Roomba and just detects it by bumping into stuff. Just it's just on a we'd murder mission just keeps going until it runs out of juice. Yeah, solar power. Well, I mean, sometimes the sun's not up. Going downhill. Okay, and so that was the macro fab engineering podcast. We were your hosts Parker Dolan and Steven Craig. Later everyone take it

Host 1     38:38

Easy.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai