How is it possible that Stephen and Parker can talk about solder and soldering supplies for over one hour. Listen to this weeks episode to find out!
What kind of soldering equipment should an engineer look at getting for their bench? Parker and Stephen start discussing equipment and supplies!
Through hole assembly for PCBs might be great for low volume prototypes but how do you scale up that process? What design considerations are needed?
Figure 1: Eddie Samuels
Figure 2: Comma.ai Hardware Lab
Figure 3: Panda ODB plug in module
Parker is an Electrical Engineer with backgrounds in Embedded System Design and Digital Signal Processing. He got his start in 2005 by hacking Nintendo consoles into portable gaming units. The following year he designed and produced an Atari 2600 video mod to allow the Atari to display a crisp, RF fuzz free picture on newer TVs. Over a thousand Atari video mods where produced by Parker from 2006 to 2011 and the mod is still made by other enthusiasts in the Atari community.
In 2006, Parker enrolled at The University of Texas at Austin as a Petroleum Engineer. After realizing electronics was his passion he switched majors in 2007 to Electrical and Computer Engineering. Following his previous background in making the Atari 2600 video mod, Parker decided to take more board layout classes and circuit design classes. Other areas of study include robotics, microcontroller theory and design, FPGA development with VHDL and Verilog, and image and signal processing with DSPs. In 2010, Parker won a Ti sponsored Launchpad programming and design contest that was held by the IEEE CS chapter at the University. Parker graduated with a BS in Electrical and Computer Engineering in the Spring of 2012.
In the Summer of 2012, Parker was hired on as an Electrical Engineer at Dynamic Perception to design and prototype new electronic products. Here, Parker learned about full product development cycles and honed his board layout skills. Seeing the difficulties in managing operations and FCC/CE compliance testing, Parker thought there had to be a better way for small electronic companies to get their product out in customer's hands.
Parker also runs the blog, longhornengineer.com, where he posts his personal projects, technical guides, and appnotes about board layout design and components.
Stephen Kraig began his electronics career by building musical oriented circuits in 2003. Stephen is an avid guitar player and, in his down time, manufactures audio electronics including guitar amplifiers, pedals, and pro audio gear. Stephen graduated with a BS in Electrical Engineering from Texas A&M University.
Special thanks to whixr over at Tymkrs for the intro and outro!
Welcome to the macro fab engineering podcast. I'm your guest, Eddie Samuels,
and we are your hosts Parker, Dolman and Steven Craig.
This is episode 81.
Our guest this week is Edie Samuels, and he has been soldering and dribbling since the seventh grade. The first thing he built was a simple 7805 mp3 battery charger, guided by one of the original Hackaday projects. After that he was hooked. He went on to get his he degree at the University of Rochester, and worked for a year in the defense industry before moving to San Francisco to work@comma.ai.
So Eddie, what does comma.ai do? And what do you do there?
Sure. So comm AI builds aftermarket self driving cars. We're using inexpensive hardware, our flagship car is the Honda Civic, which is about a $25,000 car. And our system is about on par with Tesla Autopilot right now. So we're getting people on the road with basically a fancy cruise control and the $25,000 car versus Tesla where your car will cost anywhere from like 80 to 100,000. We believe that, you know, with just more of this hardware out there, bigger data collection machine, we're gonna achieve self driving cars much faster. And the inexpensive hardware is where I come in. So I'm head of hardware. I'll do I do anything from PCB design, to all the CAD and 3d printing for our enclosures, do all the manufacturing as well as like maintain our three fleet of V three vehicles that we have right now.
Oh, so you get to turn wrenches into?
Exactly yeah, I'm taking, you know, changing batteries and fuses when they blow and what else and stuff? Yeah, I get to do a lot of the fun stuff, I get to, you know, put big gaming PCs in the back of computers and deal with all the inverters that we need for that. As well as all of our enclosures that we put over all of our hardware and is all 3d printed, mainly some designing all that and we have four 3d printers in our garage, that are just pumping out. casings all the time. They constantly running. Yeah, constantly running. What kind of 3d printers Do you have? We use a Zortrax M 200. It's more reliable. It's FDM. Okay. It's one of the more reliable FDM 's out there. They use like this perforated heated bed. So you get a really good adhesion on like the first layer of your prints, which is usually where your problems come in with FDM. Yes, you get like a bad first layer, and then the whole thing just thrown off. So they have this nice perforated bed where it gets a nice set of plastic into the bed and prints come out pretty well.
And do you print I guess the I looked at the website, which is comma.ai, which is yeah, a company name, which I guess is convenient. Is it the enclosure for the panda. Right? So what is the Yeah,
so. Okay, so the panda is the nicest universal car interface ever. So when George first started reverse engineering cars about two years ago now, he assumed he could just, you know, go on Amazon, and buy one of the many what's known as an LM dongles that are on there. There's a lot of these cheap OBD two dongles that supposedly give you all the canned data that your car is sending. But that's really not the case they use really poorly designed hardware and firmware that causes them to drop can messages and just not send you everything that your car is actually sending? So that's where panda comes in panda gives you everything that your car is sending it on the CAN bus, the LIN bus and GM LAN
G is the bus actually called GM land or is that your term for it?
So GM land is a single wire cam protocol developed by GM so it's sometimes sometimes called GM LAN. There's some long ISO to something something name as well for it. But sometimes called Dreamland, sometimes called single wire can so PanDa has three canned buses to Lin buses, which is another single wire protocol as well as that GM land bus. And most modern cars will have three or even four canned buses you know just to have isolated systems and and be able to not saturate the the canvas itself.
Cool. So So the the panda plugs into your OBD port, and sniffs all the data coming across the lines.
Yes, so panda reads all the data on the campus, and we're able to send it back over Wi Fi, or over USB, we have a 12 megahertz USB connection, you could connect to your computer. Or you can link over Wi Fi to our dash cam app, which is called Schiffer, CH FFR. And if you mount your your phone, running our dash cam app shifter and connect your pandas to the OBD, two port, you'll be able to sync up video data from your drive with the canned messages that your car was sending at that exact time.
Ah, interesting. So you can actually get some interesting debug data to your exact if your mechanic key like me.
Yeah. So along with our dash cam app Schiffer. We released a tool called cabana. And cabana is where you can watch your video and see all of the bytes that your car is actually sending. And you can use that to reverse engineer your own car. Find out which messages mean what in your car, which correspond to the steering EO which correspond to the gas and brakes and so on. And yeah, the community has really taken a liking to it. A lot of people are using it to decode the messages their their cars are sent. That's cool. Yeah.
So so I'm sorry. And so the panda can also inject its own code, right? Or inject its own signals on the bus.
So out of the box, pandas a read only device, okay. It is compatible with our open source driving agent called Open pilot. So if you if you connect it two to device running open pilot, it can interface with your car. But out of the box, pandas read only device?
Yeah. So if you don't mind going into it, can you go a little bit into what's under the hood of the panda?
Sure. So like I said, we got three canvases to lens, gam Lance, we have transceivers for all those communication protocols, which just, you know, not knock down the voltages to the correct level. And we have an arm M for doing all the heavy lifting, processing of all those messages. And then we're using ESP 8266, just one of the most beloved Wi Fi modules out there. It's inexpensive. It's in a lot of projects. It's got an SPI communication line, but to the RM for so we have a really high data link between our you know, the can messages coming in, and the Wi Fi sending out a lot of these other dongles out there just using, you know, basic UART Wi Fi module, and that just becomes the bottleneck at some point. Yeah,
what speed are you running that SPI bus at?
We're run that at 10 megahertz. Yeah, and then we still have some trouble just keep receiving Wi Fi messages and things like that. Just because Wi Fi can be a little finicky sometimes. But over USB, where the panda doesn't miss any beats from your car. So that's where the the real speed comes in.
The ask is is what makes your your dongle not miss the the signals verse the cheaper, or just the modules you buy on like eBay?
Yeah. So one of those, one of the things that slows those modules down is those UART communication lines, we have an actual USB stack, running on the arm M for written by written by George Hotz, all the all the code is open source for the panda as well. So the firmware behind it, and the Python libraries we use to interface with it are all open source and on github.com/comm ai slash panda. So but yeah, one of the other reasons it's so great as we have a really good firmware developer, but we're always looking for more people. If you if anyone out there listening is interested in coming on to the team and developing some more firmware for panda.
We would love to have you how big is your team?
We have about 1010 people now. Okay. We operate a small house in San Francisco still pretty nimble. Yeah, yeah, you have a chance to make a big impact here. Just because the team is small still. And we still fulfill a lot of roles. every individual's doing three to four jobs at least
Sure. The startup culture. Exactly. So you guys are doing you're doing like you said you're the hardware lead. How many other hardware guys are there?
It's really just me. So I can A little bit with George, on design decisions and, you know, major things like that. But I'm the only hardware guy here. Everyone else is software engineers, machine learning experts. And controls engineers, things like that.
Yeah, it kind of kind of makes a lot. I mean, the the, the the Panda, it seems like the hardware underneath is fairly straightforward and stripped down, you know, at least seems like it has, like, every part has its specific purpose. And a lot of the magic seems to happen in the code, right?
Yeah. So we needed this, this hardware to write the magical code, but yeah, the it's nothing. That innovative, I think the major innovation is that we made it so tiny. And still fast and reliable. But yeah, a lot of the magic comes from, you know, really well written firmware, software, and so on.
So some of the, like, design decisions in for like, cuz you got to hook up to the audit of the automotive bus, right? The power, like, how dirty is the voltage that you get off, let's say for the 12 volt power?
Yeah. So it's surprisingly like modern cars have pretty clean 12 volt output. I mean, you get some dip when you're starting the car just from your, your starter. So that'll, you know, that'll drop sometimes about nine volts or something like that. But there's not a whole lot of major noise on modern 12 volt lines anymore.
That's not like a USB on a laptop. Right. Which is pretty.
I mean, we it's not as clean as that. But we have those are bad. Oh, those get bad. Yeah,
those are like
they allow a full half a volt or ripple or? Yeah. Half a full and some of them actually use a whole half
full ripple. Yeah. And you get it's even worse when you unplug your your laptop from the wall.
Yeah, yeah, that's true. Yeah, when you're plugging stuff in or something, you get those huge spikes? Yeah, well, we'll see stuff like that. When you first you know, plug your panda in, we've been doing a lot of testing on things like that, you know, monitoring all our voltage lines when you slam this thing into your OBD two connector. But we have a switching power supply on there that can handle about three amps reliably. So the pet panda is the car interface. And it's also a really good phone charger. We have a special designed USB chip on there made by Ti that does all of the insane battery charging requirements for modern phones. Well, that's cool. Yeah. So is it running
it? 3.3 volts or something? Five?
Yeah, so we have our switching power supply takes the 12 down to five by five to five, two to sorry, 5.2 to 5.3 volts so that let's just charge phones a little faster. And just straight up five volts. And then we have a very low noise 3.3 regulator that provides power to the M four and the ESP. Okay. Yes. Required. Yeah, required this really low noise regulator, because we were seeing this issue during our initial prototypes where every time the ESP admits Wi Fi signal, our three three line was just bouncing like crazy. So we found this really nice low noise regulator and that solves pretty much all our issues.
Is that just because the the ESP when it transmitted, it was pulling more power and dip in the line. Exactly. So okay, so that power supply, or that ldeo It's probably an LTO, right? Yep. Yep. Tighter line regulation, then
yeah, it's got tighter line regulations. You know, you always see diagrams of what these LD O's are capable of ripple wise. In this one is able to recover in a few microseconds instead of normally they're like, 10 to 100 milliseconds.
You got a part number you can you can share it with everyone.
Oh, the part number let's see, it's a what is it is an MVC. I'd have to look it up. I can, I can email it to you guys.
Yeah, we'll put it in the show notes. Yeah,
yeah, I highly recommend it but I don't want too many people buying and we're gonna run out of stock.
But I mean, I hear you've got everything behind two separate, active regulating circuits. I mean, you got so even if you're 12 volts as noisy as crap, you got a switcher that should be able to handle the majority of that noise and then the 3.3 which takes it down to nothing, right? Yeah. Have you ever measured the noise to see what it is?
Oh, yeah, we're we have a very in depth test plan we put pandas through to monitor All kinds of stuff like this. We had a beta program, macro fed produced, like our force 100 boards for our beta program a few months ago. And since then, we've refined the design a lot, kind of gotten all our noise levels much lower right now our power supplies are all within 1% of their recommended value. That's pretty standard for switching power supply. That's about all you can really get to. But yeah, we're seeing about, you know, when the Wi Fi modules transmitting, now we'll see like 40 millivolts, of ripple on our five, five line, or sorry, five, five foot line, and the three three line is practically invisible.
It's real DC.
True, say again, true.
Do you see a true DC?
Well, yeah, but you but you also probably also have a lot of bulk capacitance on the output of the regulator, right? Oh, yeah.
Yeah, so we, you know, Panda is just covered with capacitors, every, every square inch that's free. We put some bulk capacitors, so we're just mitigating any noise issues. That way. You know, what
it kind of reminds me of, I saw a picture of it on your website earlier today. And you know, the little USB dongles that you get with a wireless mouse. Just a little tiny little plugin things. It looks like one of those but a lot larger, that plugs into the OBD port.
Yeah, yeah, we tried to make it just as tiny as possible, because a lot of cars will put their OBD port in really strange places. And we want to be able to fit in every car, you know, just because it's the nicest car interface, we're going to fit in every car, you know.
So the can Cambus or all the other buses that you talk to, is there any special considerations you have to do besides just like, plop down a transceiver for that specific bus?
That yeah, I mean, the the basics of it is you plop down the transceiver, but you got to be aware of, you know, how you're interacting with the transceiver more with the firmware. Because if you're, if you're interacting with the transceiver wrong, you can disable the whole canvas of the car basically. So we're really conscious of you know, every, every way we're listening on the CAN bus, we saw an issue, when we were first plugging in our prototypes into Ford cars, it was affecting the entertainment system that that can module was running at a different speed. And our device listening at the wrong speed, caused some kind of crippling of that of that bus. So we're very conscious of things like that. Do lots of tests thing in order to avoid other issues like that.
People got to listen to the radio.
So actually,
I guess, I guess, if you have an auto driving car, you got to do something else besides drive.
So yeah, so I saw a video
of a guy who's like leaning back and reading a newspaper, a little while back, and I like, I wouldn't be okay with that just yet. You know, maybe I'm old school, but like, the whole driving, self driving car, I'm like, Yeah, cool. That would be fun. But I'd still want at least have visibility, you know, I wouldn't want a big book in my face or something.
Yeah, like, I'll drive our cars, you know, down, down, South sometimes. And I like it because I don't have to focus on you know, gas and brakes and steering, the car is doing that very reliably when you're on the highway. So I'm able to, like, look around and check out my surroundings even more. I feel like I'm more aware of the cars around me. You can make funny
faces as you pass the trucker. Right. Yeah,
exactly. Pass the trucker but always have your hands on the wheel, not condoning any kind of crazy behavior, you know.
So real quick, for those of us who are are not fully up to date on it, get it? Can you just explain what a CAN bus actually is? Probably should have done this earlier. Sure.
So the canvas is a communication bus, it's on every motor vehicle. It's been used for a while and the you know, mandated since 1996. So all your vehicle ECUs are communicating on this bus. It's a differential pair protocol, which is good for noisy environments, like cars because you don't need a reference to ground. You determine what bits are being sent. Just from the the differences in the in this wires. So the nice thing about can is that you can listen without any modules really no any modules on the car can be sending, they don't know who they're sending a message to because it's a bus and everyone can listen. So we're able to use that feature of the bus to capture all this data that you Your Car send it and analyze it. Yeah, it like the LIN bus is similar it's it's a 12 volt protocol though, can is about 2.5 to five volts. And when is 12 to zero there, they're using just a single wire so there's a lot more room for error in the in that voltage range as much slow slower speed for that reason modern can runs like anywhere from 125 to 125 kilobit per second to one megabit per second. And your LIN bus will run at like 10.4k That's low Yeah, it's pretty slow
the transceiver chips do that you have in the in the panda are they specific for cam
Yeah, we're using what company are using we're using it's a TGA 1048. It's NXP is makes our transceiver Oh, that was our dual. Sorry, we were using that chip before I think now now we're using the 1042 for anyone who, who really cares TJ 1042. It comes in a small package, which is good for PanDa because panda small. It's kind of rare to find these transceivers in the nice qf N packages that we need
the most the ones I've seen are Sri sees. Yeah,
there's a lot of soI C's or GM LAN transceiver only comes in so SAIC, which really bummed me out for a while. But, yeah, I mean, it makes sense because, like, space is not really an issue and where can is is used? Because it's it's used in cars and like large industrial quick equipment, where you have a lot of space to mount large circuit boards, that were kind of changing the use case of it by making this tiny device that is still capable of communicating on all these buses. Oh, yeah. What else we use? Yeah, we're using that TJ temporary to NXP also makes our Lin transceiver we found a QR fan dual Lin transceiver. Most cars use Lin to flash ECUs you're able to flash things like your steering controller brake module overland, and in in modern cars update, where that kind of stuff. Yeah, you can update the firmware so that like when you bring your car in for a firmware update, that's how they're doing all that. And we play around with stuff like that. For instance, to increase the torque limit on our Honda Civic, we were able to just change one line of the steering controller firmware and get 6% more torque that we were able to put on the steering wheel. So that allows us to make a little little sharp returns when you're using open pilot. But still still a very safe limit you're still able to counteract any any torque that our system is putting on the steering wheel. Yeah, but panda just gives us the opportunity to to play with all these different interfaces that your car has. We have some people porting our the open pilot system to other vehicles. Someone's working on the Chevy Volt so few people are porting it to a hardware Why sorry, not non autopilot Tesla. Some people are working on putting open pilot on an old Tesla.
Oh, I thought that old Tesla's could have it. I guess the older ones just don't have the the brain power hmm
yeah, the the older ones don't have any of the hardware to really yeah, they don't have the sensors or the power. Yeah.
You had an open call for people to test vehicles right?
Yeah, we have a few bounties still online if you go to comma.ai/bounties Let's see Let me confirm that COMM A slash bounty? No, that does not exist maybe bounties? i Yes. Anyway, we have a few cars up there that you can you can make about five to 10k on if you if you port our system to that car and make a pull requests to our open source system, open pilot. And we want people to kind of develop this community around our open source driving agent and just get it out on more vehicles.
That's really cool. Yeah. What? What do you have up on the bounding page? Do you remember what cars you're looking for
right now? He's Siemens probably looking to see if his cars on there. Yeah, easy.
Do you have a 2018 We ordered to coma. I doubt that's
a coma, it's not on there. It's 2017. Maybe, maybe we could get our system on there. So we need it. We need a few things to make OpenPilot work on other vehicles, you need your steering controller over can and braking gas on can so all all these modern cars at ACC. And what's called Lane Keep Assist. A lot. You'll see different acronyms for that. l Cass. Or there's a few others I'm forgetting right now. But if your car comes with those systems, we're able to interface with them. Yeah. And all of the new Toyotas do
it because the my jeep? Yeah, won't work.
No.
Yeah. I've heard you talk about your Jeep a lot on here, I think right?
Yeah. your Jeep is no less analog is no electronic. Anything. Yeah, it's very analog.
How many miles on that thing?
Just went over 207,000 miles.
Well, that's just not on the same engine.
Not on same engine. It's
got your place the engine.
Yeah, I had the engine rebuilt 15,000 Miles go.
So Wow. So that's your love you love love this car. All right.
It's a it's a really fun car. Sounds fun. So yeah, so um, do you have anything else to add about panda and come on.ai?
Let's see, pandas are still available for preorder. If you go to Panda ccommodate Ai, you can reserve your spot. We'll be shipping in a few more weeks here. We're working with you guys macro fab to do all of our manufacturing, which is exciting. We got our first batch of 100 in from you guys did some final testing and just doing final assembly in house.
firing up the 3d printers. Yep, we
got 3d printers going. We're sanding all the 3d printed cases to give you a nice smooth finish quality product. Panda is a high quality, amazing product. And now it's the nicest ever.
So I was looking at your website. Eddie earlier today? Yeah. You haven't updated this since you graduated? Yeah, I have not updating my personal website. Don't worry. My mind is like the same way. I was looking at.
Forget about these things.
Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's just become less important. Well, yeah.
Your passion comedy, or macro fab. What are you just dominates everything? Yeah, at that braid? Because I was looking at your underwater rover project.
Yeah. So yeah.
So talk more about that.
Sure. So that was a project I did. The summer between my junior and senior year. I was in a program sponsored by Lockheed Martin, this New York Space Grant Program, and we were given the opportunity to work at Lockheed Martin. It was a project funded by NASA, so we had to have some kind of link to space in some way. So we decided to build this underwater rover sort of had some loose ties to space. But we were using it was all Arduino based. We're using bilge pumps to propel the thing. We had a first person view camera, so you could you could drive it around in your pool or whatever. We never did any real ocean testing, only pool testing. We had a camera up there. And then there was a tether back to a buoy that would float on the water. And we had a wireless link from that buoy, to a Arduino base controller that you can use to drive us around and we had to use the buoy because RF just doesn't really work underwater. No, it doesn't like super low frequency. But yeah, we ran into a ton of issues just like sealing this thing. We would take it on IP
ratings are not easy to get.
Yeah, it was not easy like we had it was PVC to a giant PVC tube. And then we had this clear dome that we tried to glue to the front and still have a watertight seal and it was just never never perfect. You know it would be it would be good at a certain depth of the water and then you bring it under a little more and the pressure was just too great. It would find some leak in our seal and get in there. We had a leak detector in there so that when it started to fill with water, who would shut off the lithium ion battery. So we didn't have any explosions ever
saw how the leak detector work the we
had to like small strips of aluminum foil tape that we had on the bottom of the PVC to and that went to the transistor circuit that would disable the relay whenever those two contacts were closed by water.
Ah, so when Yeah, basically whenever they they contacted they just opened up that relay. Cool. Exactly.
Yeah, yes, it works. Exactly. Yeah, it's brute force. It worked for a simple two month project.
How often did that trip
that was tripping quite a bit we'd get we'd go under for about 10 minutes and then that thing would trip and our our test would be over it was very frustrating. Yeah, if you if you're ever building underwater rovers use a sealed project box if possible. Yeah, if you don't buy an off the shelf
solution, it's way easier.
Oh, you probably go to you know Hammond manufacturer just get the the rover module right? Probably do.
Em and project box rover for sure. Yeah.
Next week, they're gonna have a new product announcement. That's that.
someone's listening, taking all our ideas.
Exactly. And then I'm more in line with what you're currently doing. Your Electric Jetta. Yeah, looks like you put a warp nine motor in it. I was just looking at the pictures. Is that my right? Cool. Yeah, you
got a good eye? How do you know the warp nine.
I've been doing a lot of research on what I want to cuz I do a lot of project vehicles. And so my next one I want to do is electric least thinking about it. And somebody's looking at motors,
cool. Project vehicles, like, my jeep is a constant products. Gotcha. You have all kinds of electronics on it. No, no,
just fixing it up and stuff. So it's like I'm looking for the next, you know, when the Jeep is, you know, quote unquote, done. Because project vehicles are never done.
Yeah, you only just stop working.
Yeah, you just stop working on it.
You just stop and get tired. Yeah, well, I was in high school. Still, I saw I was subscriber to MAKE magazine. And one of the early issues had a section on electric vehicle conversions. They made it seem really simple. You just take out your gas engine, throw in your electric motor bunch of batteries in the trunk, and your motor controller under the hood and you got your electric car. So I convince my dad to find a shop to help us convert this vehicle. So we bought an old manual Jetta bought all the parts. And with help from a few mechanics and a small company in St. Petersburg, Florida, we had this conversion done. And we drove it around for about about a year there are always some bugs, there's the one of the more difficult parts is getting a good mate between the electric motor and the transmission of the car. You need to fabricate like a custom coupler that connects it to and this thing has to be perfect because if there's any wobble it just you know gets worse and worse over time every time you run this thing. So we started to run into mechanical issues at that point and ended up finding someone who had done a similar conversion to take the car on and fix it up and he ended up selling it to someone else. So it's it's still lives today, but in a much different for
how much we get out of it.
We were we were going only about 40 or 50 miles because we had 12 huge lead acid batteries of the trunk. Couple 100 Yeah, it was a lot of batteries. 144 volts we cut a hole in the trunk and built this custom battery box at a steel that likes you know had the battery sit a little lower to help with the center gravity in the car. But it's still just a ton of weight to get rolled.
That's it that's what people don't realize what Evie conversions is the motor weighs a lot less than right engine and an ice engine in the vehicle. But the batteries and the brain to 300 pounds more than everything then basically the curb weight of the vehicle was originally
right and then you and your it's in the complete opposite space that it's supposed to be. Yeah, right. So your front end is sticking up and the back is just leaning behind. Yeah. Yeah, that was that was a crazy project learned a lot from that does a good lesson on, you know, a whole a whole bunch of electronics.
How old were you when you did this?
This was like my sophomore year of high school. So I was like 17, or 18. I just learned to drive and was just addicted to the idea of making this conversion is like electric fields were a really common man. You know, you had a few Tesla Roadsters out there, but everything else was very low range. And a lot of the cars, they be produced, like Toyota had a electric rav4 that they produce early on. And then they ended up like crushing them all. There's a few cars like that GM had one as well. There's this movie called the death of the electric car, I think. And they tell this whole story about how GM produced this Evie one that was called. And they had like three year leases on these electric field goals. Everyone loved them. And then when the leases were up, they just crushed them all. The revenge of the electric car. That was what it's called. Ah, yeah, exactly. Yeah.
I've seen I've seen the death of electric car.
I forget, I think I think maybe they see two different documentary. Let's see the revenge of the electric car has the first hit on Google. From 2011
That sounds right.
Yeah, I can. Yeah. Yeah, wow. Wow. A lot to talk about there.
Yeah. Um, so I guess we're gonna go and play Steve's game.
Yeah, what's this game? I know, I forget. Okay, so
So this is a new bit that we we added actually, last week was the first time we did Steve's game. It's a it's a simple game that we play with all of our guests now. So this is one. Well, yeah, yeah. All our guests so far. So one,
yes, was done it. Okay, I want to
say you're number two on Steve's game. So this week, I'm going to do it just a tad bit different. What I'm going to do is I'm going to present the game to you, and then I'm going to tell a little bit of a story. So that you can have a little bit of time to think about the game. And then and then we'll all will all answer the game. So the way the game goes, is I'm going to present a scenario to you and then ask you a question about the scenario. And it's just okay, there's no wrong answer. And it's more fun to just see like, how does your mind think about the scenario? Okay, so here's the scenario. There's a tube, and there's a ball inside the tube. Okay, you need to get the ball out of the tube. How do you do it? Okay, so, so here's the story that goes behind this one. So give you some time to think about it. So I was actually asked this question by a professor of mine at Texas a&m, when I was going to school there. There was one summer that I took summer classes just to kind of get some stuff out of the way. And one of the classes was a complete bullshit class. And it was it was literally I think it was called, like thinking, I was like,
underwater basket weaving,
it was very close to that quality.
No, no, seriously, underwater basket. Weaving becomes so prolific. That's always the go to Yeah, it's
because of tubes and balls. No, no. Okay. So this class was really, it was ridiculous. It was an instantaneous, a, let's just put it this with the first class, our professor actually had us take a nap, as like that was our assignment. So it was a huge auditorium. And it was meant to be one of these things where we all kind of get in there. And we just like, find new ways to think about things. And one of the classes he presented the professor to a class of like 700, people like that you got a tube and there's a ball in the tube. And he put us in groups of four, and he said, Come up with a solution to get it out of the tube. And the thing that was funny about is all of us are sitting there like this, we're all coming up with like contraptions and things. And we're like, actually, like trying really hard here. And there's no wrong answer to this question. And the professor was going from from group to group hearing solutions, and I don't remember at the time what our solution was in the group, but he literally leans down he goes, You know what I would do? I'd pee in the tube until the ball comes out. And we were all like, really? Like, really? That's your solution?
We could do that.
Yes. Professor old Oh, yeah.
Yeah, yeah. Professor Professor gray beard
does not care anymore. Yeah,
no, he doesn't care. He knows his classes and instantaneous a he's there for a paycheck. Regardless. It was it was still kind of fun. And that stuck with me because it was just like, this is the most ridiculous thing ever, but so I will give you a solution that I can come up with so yeah, just just for fun, what I would do is I would drill a hole at the bottom of the tube and I would fill it with gunpowder and I would blow the hell out of the ball and shoot it out like you make
a potato cannon,
basically. Yeah, basically. But But knowing me I would actually make the gunpowder I used to do that with my dad in my backyard, we grind our own gunpowder just what do you
start with? It's like a brick of gun you take a gun.
So my my mother is a is a legal teacher in the state of Texas. She can buy chemicals that are not particularly available to the Joe Schmo. So I used to just tell her mom buy me a bottle of sulfur mom buy me potassium nitrate, you know. So you get a charcoal briquette potassium nitrate and sulfur and you mix them all together and Bam, you got gunpowder. So Ham, and then add you know, bam, literally, yeah, no, add some titanium or add chromium and you got different colors. You can make fireworks. Yeah, like that. So it's cool. Yeah. So I would make canonet. See, I think nowadays you can buy
all that on Amazon. Or at Home Depot.
Yeah. It's got to be some regulation about shipping that stuff.
mixed up. No, they just put on ground. Ground shipping be fine. Yeah. No, that's cool. Yes. Yeah. People too worried about lithium batteries. So they're really worried about
that. Let's let's let's go round robin. And let's do let's do Parker next.
Oh, I was listening to your story. I wasn't really thinking about it. I guess it doesn't really matter. I would just squeeze the tube. Sure. Hmm. Yeah.
So the tube was flexible. I guess you can just go up. Yeah. That so all listeners didn't get to see one hand motion I did for that. Oh,
I think I think that sound effect is more than adequate to understand what was going on. That's a fun one. Okay, so Eddie, you got it. You got an idea?
Yeah. So I'm really into laser cutting. Right now we recently got a laser cutter. I think I'd have to go with the laser cutter would need some nice way to mount it in there. Otherwise, keep rolling around when the plotter is moving. But running our laser cutter is a blast. It really pisses off everyone in the office because it smells terrible. Yeah, go with that.
Cool. So use cut cut an open when the balls out.
Yeah, cut it open the balls that, you know, maybe cut the ball up to make it a little easier to get out.
Yeah. And there's no no, doesn't say that the ball can't be cut so
well. And on top of that, I like the kind of questions like this where I didn't explain how big the tube is. I didn't explain how small the ball is. It doesn't matter. It was more about like, how did you interpret it? And how did you?
Yeah, I mean, the two might be open for all we know, we could just tell.
So if our listeners to get the swag for this week, send in an answer to that question. Oh, that's
a good one instead of a code word this week. Yeah, send in an answer to Steve's game for this week. And send it in to podcast at macro fab.com along with your address. And we'll send some cool swag away. Yep.
Nice. So I still eligible to wait to win that are
actually we actually included all of swag that
we got all this way. I really like the t shirt. You get the
custom guest t shirt. No one else.
Yeah. A little bit of beer smell on it. But you know
Yep. The for all the listeners out there. The the box I got had some beers in it with the microphone and one did explode. San Francisco UPS is not very nice.
Did the macro watch show up?
Yeah, the macro watch is cool. I like that. Yeah. Awesome. Very. I think you're the first guest to get one. Oh, really? We didn't have no special. Who designed that? Watch. I was be me. Oh, awesome. Yeah, it looks very cool. And check it out under the microscope.
Oh, cool. We built that too. So check out our manufacturing quality, I guess.
Oh, yeah. I've been doing that all week. It's very top notch.
So, Eddie, where can people find out more about you and comma.ai?
Sure. So you can follow me on Twitter at Ed Sammy EDSA mmm, why? I usually post some updates on panda manufacturing there. So if you're awaiting your panda and have sent us emails asking about it, check out Twitter, you'll see some updates. You can check out comma AI on Twitter, comma underscore AI. And yeah, we usually post updates there, what we're doing, where we stand if we're doing any software updates to open pilot feel free to check at our GitHub COMM A github.com/kamay. You can find panda software, open pilot, and all kinds of other stuff that's democratizing self driving cars.
Cool. So you want to sign us up, Eddie?
Sure. That was the macro fab engineering podcast, and I was your guest, Eddie's famous.
And we're your hosts Parker Dolan and Steven Craig. Later everyone take it easy Thank you. Yes, you our listener for downloading our show. If you enjoy this episode, consider sharing it with your fellow engineers, co workers or friends. They might not be friends after you do that though. But if you have a cool idea project topic that you want Steven and I to discuss, tweet at us at macro fab, or email us at podcast at macro comm there's a lot of ATS there. If you are not subscribed to the podcast yet, click that subscribe button. That way you get the latest map episode right when it releases, and we'd love to and we'd love it if you'd review us on Twitter, or iTunes. One of those things
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