Parker talks with Brandon Satrom of Particle about the future of IoT and then design and prototype an IoT device.
Agustin Pelaez and Cameron Klotz of Ubidots talk about what is IoT and how to start an IoT Project.
John Adams joins Parker and Stephen to discuss IoT Security, Crappy IoT Devices, and WS2812B LEDs.
Figure 1: Brian Dortons IoT BBQ with some delicious brisket.
Figure 2: The controller iterations Parker worked on.
Figure 3: IoT “cloud” Brian and Matt built.
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.
We are your guests. Yeah, yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. So we are your guests, Matt keys with the iron yard.
Brian Dorton with the iron yard
and we're your hosts Parker Dolan
and Steven Craig.
That was a little unorthodox, but it works.
So this is episode 20. Yep. And we thought it would be fun to zero have two guests on the podcast. They will up. doubled up. That's right. That's right. So our first
two guests podcast. Yeah. So Matt keys is a Oklahoma born Texas raised Southerner with a brief Australian and British British residences. He learned programming in high school, but quickly branch. I'm not going to keep going on to the iron your website, there is like an enormous paragraph saying what Mackies is. So Mikey just explained to yourself, or to everyone listening? Who are you?
Who am I? Yeah, so I,
who are you not?
Who am I not. I'm not a dancer. And I am not someone who does not go to plays. No, I, I've been programming for a long time. And I just kind of gotten too, into tech and got into computer security in college. And I kind of got into compilers and stuff like that. So I went to UT and ended up going deep down the rabbit hole. And then quickly after like two years of core computer science stuff, and university, I found myself without any other computer science courses to take. So I had to take like art and things like that. So I got into startups. And as I got into startups, I started getting more into like web development and things I had to kind of figure that stuff out. Lo and behold, three startups later, and like a lot of many, many years, and some gray hair added. Now, working with the owner to kind of help I first taught, like classes there. And now I kind of help train instructors as they come into the company.
Cool. Very cool.
And Brian Jordan. And so I was looking up your description, and the only thing because you're not on the iron yard website on the about right, right. So the only description I could find was or your Twitter handle. And it says campus structure for iron art Houston.
That was it. That's pretty much it. That next. Next No, no, no
no, that was the podcast.
So yeah, like I've, I've been in education for over a decade now. And I graduated from Texas a&m. And, oops, over here. I didn't you know, I was in the in the boat of didn't really know what I wanted to do when I grew up. And, you know, started getting into some teaching and and really kind of found my groove there and figured out that I'm not a great teacher of kids, but I'm a great teacher of adults. So found that out pretty soon. And because I was pretty terrible in the classroom. And I've always been the tech dork in, in everywhere that I've been. And I was able to kind of kind of take that passion, start integrating technology with teachers did that for about 10 years. And then I found the iron yard. And it was a perfect intersection. So I started learning to code myself back in oh eight. So I can in no way an expert but I can kind of hold my own and in some regard. And this was a perfect opportunity to kind of stay in the career that I love, which is education and a perfect intersection for what I do. So I'm now I run the Houston office here and have a great time doing it. Cool. Awesome. Awesome.
So um, so just so our listeners aren't in the dark. Can y'all like quickly explain like, two three sentences what the iron yard is?
Yeah, very, very much. So we will take you from zero to hero when it comes to a a ay development career. We're a 12 week Code School and full into full full time intensive and, you know, we teach you how to become a web developer.
What languages do y'all typically cover?
So right now we're running JavaScript, Ruby on Rails and iOS.
Good times that's in Houston. In other locations. You know, we do have classes that get into Java and closure Java and Scala. So for those of you who know, like the functional side of things, we've got UI design classes, Python, back end engineering, and also Python and data science. So in other locations, Scott like dotnet. So for Windows environments and stuff like that to
go to talking to two engineers that all we know is C.
Yeah, let's see assembly. Yeah, we don't do that. I just had my first exploration into Python last week. And spin and spin, right been doing spin with propeller pythons. Cool. I dig Python. It's super easy. I didn't have to do basically any learning and I was able to read the code. It's pretty straightforward.
Yeah. And I think that's what got me into Ruby in general is just that that readability and Ruby and Python are both kind of in and of the same when it's just a readable code. Take out the Articles of a sentence, and you pretty much have what you what you need to make it work. Sure.
Yeah. Lack of pointers. No memory management. That's, that's great. It's great up here. You guys should join us.
It's exact opposite of Si. Si is what registered Ronnie to hit to make this bit flip.
Yes, that's a that's the good stuff.
Ah, so besides the iron yard? What do you all do for hobbies? And that kind of stuff? I guess we'll start with that. Yeah, yeah.
So I mean, hobby wise. In my like, I guess my most recent stuff I've been doing is kind of around conferences. So I started a conference series here in Houston with a group of friends. And we just had our second event annual event in May 2016. And then I also started a conference up in Utah. So I'm trying to do something that kind of gets my passion around like snowboarding in the mountains, my wife and I try to, you know, we have a family that live up in Colorado, we try to go at least a couple times a year. And so when every time I go up there that I come back, like super inspired, and just ready to say like, what's next for me? And I wanted to kind of like, share that inspiration with other people. So I'm trying to launch another conference at their awesome. What are the conferences cover? It's primarily tech related. So the specialty one right now is just basically js. So it's just a JavaScript conference. Okay. We're hopeful to kind of maybe branch out a little bit from just JavaScript to maybe do something else that's maybe like a general programming, or functional programming with that, like, you have a different audience in different geographic area. So that sure depends on whether or not we can make that work. Otherwise, we'll just do a meet up. Right. The alternative is for a destination code, which is something where it does talk about entrepreneurship and indie development. And you know, like, maybe some hardware, right, we got a guy who's trying to research kind of automating his home brewing system. We were trying to do something like on the floor, they're just like, the the interactive session is like, Let's build the home brewing kit with like this Arduino attached. So we're trying to figure that stuff out, right?
Actually, Stephens working on something like that. Yep.
In fact, I think we will be talking about that later in the podcast. Yep. Nice. Well, that's awesome. How about you, Brian?
Yeah. So I spend most of my free time. You know, I enjoy, enjoy sports, and I'll play some golf whenever I can. 98% of my free time is kind of with my two daughters. I've got a four year old and a one year old, so pretty busy, pretty busy when not when not at work, and but like, they're, they're amazing, amazing girls. And it's, it's so much fun. You know, being around them and watching them grow up. It's awesome. But that that definitely takes my time. And they're
adorable. They're the cutest little thing. How cool. Is
that? Is that why you had to make an IoT barbecue?
That is pretty much it like you like you just but really, and truly, one of the reasons that I did that was was I was kind of getting a little bit of flak from my wife about like, coming in and out so much to go outside and tend to the barbecue pit. So the idea was like, Well, let me just see what I can do about that.
So I'm not going to compromise on barbecue.
Barbecue is not going away.
We're Welcome to Marriage. We're not compromising a barbecue.
So yeah, I guess we'll talk about that project. Sure. IoT barbecue. He tweeted about it. Yeah, what's it what is its IP address?
So it's barbecued barbecue.dorton.co and it so I can't take full I mean, I can't take any credit for this. This was this was my first ever hardware project. So the whole idea of that for me was like, I want to just get out of my comfort zone like a I wanted to build this and I wanted this just to have it but below Like, I could have very easily gone and bought, you know, there there on the market. But like I wanted to learn it. And so like, step one, I want to learn how to solder, right? Like, I've never soldered anything before. So like, let's figure this out. Step two, I want to know, like, what does what is a PCB board? What What, what are these things? Like what what can I do with it? What goes where, why do these things go here? What, what is the resistor? And, and yeah, I mean like the fact that all of these all the plans, all the code, it's all open source. It's all on GitHub, you know, the fact that I can just go on there and download it and follow the steps. I mean, that's pretty freakin awesome. So this one, the one that I the project that I was I made was a heater meter. A guy named Brian Mayland out of Florida. That's this is his, his baby cap cap, and Brian on on GitHub, I got to know that well, because there's a lot. And, you know, he did a great job of laying out like, for beginners, like me, like, here are the steps that you need to do, here's what you need to buy. You know, here's, here's the schematics that you need to send to go. Like, had I known that, you know, like, this would have been perfect for macro fab. Like, hey, I can just send this to you guys. And like, you guys can make this if I even knew what this was the thing.
And that's the only advertisement for this episode.
The brand new division, the macro meat division. Barbecue equipment. Macro meal. Yeah,
so pivot.
So okay, I met Brian a few months ago, actually. And he discussed the the barbecue with me, and mentioned that this was kind of your first exploration into the world of physical things. Electronics,
what? zeros and ones are physical on the hard drive?
Oh, come on, man.
No compiling of hardware device takes like, two three weeks? That's the only difference?
I guess. Well, depends on how fast you are laying it out. Right?
No, no, after you lay it out takes two three weeks.
Oh, yeah. To actually physically come into existence. Yeah. That's fair. So I what I'm curious about is, since you went from what I'm guessing is not much or no idea of what hardware is actually having something that works. What did what did you learn along the way? What what was like? What was some like, interesting points. So
first one, like, plain and simple, like, buy two of everything. Two of everything, something. But, uh, you know, I just thought it was. So I was I was already familiar with, you know, Arduinos, I was already familiar with, with Raspberry Pi's. And in terms of like, what are these like I can, okay, I can kind of see the possibilities of things, but I've never, you know, put things together to, to, to a working product. Yeah. And, like physically going through and putting pieces together. All of a sudden, things started coming clear. I get it. Okay. So this, this, or this chip is here to receive this analog data. And this chip is here to process this data. Yeah. And like seeing that, and actually putting it together, like, everything started clicking. Well, not everything. But like, a lot of things started clicking. And it was awesome. It was I couldn't recommend more for people just to get out of their comfort zone and give it a shot. You know,
it's fun. It's fun when you start to realize that hardware is not as scary as it looks. Yeah. Just because there's all these parts and they look, they're a bunch of different colors, a bunch of different things. What do you think? Do they got all these pins? And then and then you start getting into and it's just like, wow, this is a lot easier than I thought it was gonna be? Yeah, especially easy.
I think there's sort of more, at least in my own explorations is sort of like well, I think every else is just sort of like as confused as I am. Right. If it breaks, it breaks. Yeah, I sort of like the approach there's a lot of just let's not depend on getting it perfect. The first time was just iterate a bunch of times. Yeah, you know, well, I'll give you I'll give
you a perfect example. Like I have no qualms whatsoever. So we have a TV at the office that is that's burnt out looks like it's like a power source. Like five years ago, me would have been like, well, we got to buy a new TV. Now me I don't have any problems at all. unscrewing the back of that TV, finding that power board and like either trying to repair it myself or just replacing it right.
I mean, typically they have the part somewhere right on eBay. Right? Right.
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's 1000 Different sources you can you can get them from Yeah. And when it comes to stuff like that, a lot of times, you know, TV, it just stopped working you open up look for the thing that is burnt and black.
Yeah, yeah. But like, I wouldn't have had either the confidence or like even the know with all to even look into doing that. And without gaining that little bit of experience that I have like, again, I'm in no way an expert or anything like I'm as novice as they come but with it comes like confidence, right? Yeah, I think that's part of the game. Well, you've looked inside the rabbit hole. And I'm, I'm sure it's a lot deeper than you might have thought, oh, man like that. The ideas that come along with this are just like, it just keeps going. It just keeps
going. And speaking ideas. What, what would you want to add to your your barbecue pit now?
Yeah, so like, there, there are things that it does a great job. Like it's awesome. How good is the brisket? It's fantastic. It is. It is fantastic.
Like I literally have had most barbecue joints inside 610. Right. And yeah, Brian's up there. It is competitively delicious.
It does it does the brisket itself tweet out be like, Man, I'm super amazing.
So definitely Brian, I mean, he has shown me the interface. And I can't remember if you were actually like, had the smoker going at one point, but did show me the interface. And it was, you know, showing all these graphs and everything else. And I was like, I don't know what this is doing. But this is incredible. This is cool.
Statistics. Yeah, that's exactly what it does. It'll it'll, it'll output you exactly what's going on. It'll give you some ambient temperatures. They'll give you temperatures of the pet of your of the food that you're cooking. And barbecue is simple, like keep it at a constant steady temperature until the food is at the temperature that's ideal for that food right now and then pull it off like you do that you've got delicious barbecue. This thing automates all that.
That's super cool. First good. Yeah. People don't know. Texan Texas barbecue is all about the brisket. That's right.
Oh, yeah. We don't like sauce.
Sauce. It's not good. Yeah, exactly. That's those are fighting words. And I understand.
Kentucky is gonna come down and
that brings up another question, chili, does it have meat? I mean, does that mean does it have been? No, no
beans, no beans. no means
perfect. There's something about Longhorns and Aggies can agree upon that.
Explain that. So So Matt graduated from University of Texas. Yeah. And Bryan graduate from a&m. Yep. I graduated from UT. And I'm a&m and it's actually really funny as we sat on opposite sides of the room.
Yes, naturally,
just around. Brian's like, I'm from a&m. Like we felt
the aura over there and we wanted to be as far away from it.
burnt orange. Yeah. burnt orange pants. Love it.
Is your color burnt? What is the purpose of having a burnt color? Are you in Texas?
Yeah, it's like just go outside and you'll be burned.
I mean, isn't maroon just burnt red moving
burnt orange couch.
That is true. Yeah, we are
pretty gross. But it was made of the letter of vivo. Yeah,
I'm surprised constantly just didn't combust into fireballs.
Oh, here's some tea by the way. Oh,
I think I think the thing that I would say
all of 10 engineers that watching listen to this will actually get these jokes. I
know right. I think the thing that I would add right now would be a solar solar sources of energy because it's kind of ridiculous. I have to plug it in. Right? Yeah. Like that's ridiculous. And then the second one is like and then the second one like I love the idea that like it should probably tweet things. Oh, yeah. Like tweet yet. It doesn't tweet Oh, metal email and text me when things need to to need to change. But it needs to tweet as well. I mean, like it doesn't it's kind of unfair, that I'm the only person that is getting communicating with
other people need to see your delicious,
really, really interested, it also needs a camera. So you can just take a picture of what's
going on. I was just about to say that but a high temp camera that's inside the barbecue. That takes like, really, really high quality up close picture like
time lapse.
And you can get and get like a FLIR image to have a temperature profile. Where is where are the hot spots? Yeah, the problem is, if you do this, and it tweets, you're gonna have people showing up at your house when
if you could have a gradient of a temperature throughout the meat. That would be if you could plot your meat temperature from outside your time from your
tweets. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's right, for sure.
Well, that's a smoker
moved. No, he Well, here's the thing. He'd be sitting in his house and he starts to see the tweet, hook up to a car and drive off away. So actually, onto the RFO, because these these kind of questions lead into our first quit or first RFO question here.
And so the RFO is the rapid fire opinion section, which basically we have a couple like news or random random ideas, questions, that's when we'll say something and we just really want your opinion. So we'll explain what it is. Give a little bit of background and you all just say something off the cuff and bla bla bla bla.
So the first question and Rfo is, is actually kind of more of a statement. It's a feature creep. So have you guys ever suffered from the the beast that is feature creep, in other words, a project where you have an idea for it, and just like the barbecue, you keep adding so much crap to it, that it either becomes so daunting, that it takes forever, or you just shelf the project because you have
added so much crap to it. And most of those, most of those start with conversations that are like, it's kind of ridiculous that this doesn't
you XYZ.
Matt, Matt's probably got some really relevant Yeah.
He just got really quiet. It's like a lot of code.
Yeah, I'm in like, I think my my general response to somebody asked me like, can we add this feature in you know, I'll talk about like, okay, there's speed of development. There's, there's features, and then there's costs, right? Just pick two. Hey, yeah,
yeah, that's like the the engineering, what is it? cheap, cheap, fast,
good, good. Yeah, they pick to write very similar mantra. And that's sort of like, in my own experience, it's a sort of, you've got to kind of choose that, especially in side projects. You know, I even got to like speak at a conference in Richmond, Virginia, all about side projects. And here's like, things I've been building and how I made that work. Right. And if you if you set off without, like, a real idea in mind, that's fun. It's like this is Oh, comic, I can't remember what it is. We can give you a link afterwards. But like, it basically references like, here's a developer talking to somebody and he's building a house, but then there's a bunch of like, in the wasteland behind there's like, 300 houses that are half built, eventually,
in the same XKCD
I can't remember the name of the comic is, but we'll find your link it the similar idea. It's just sort of like, you can't just go and, and decide that you want to just start like hacking on something unless you are okay with knowing that that's how it's gonna work. Like I might not finish this. And the other side is similar in same like, entrepreneur, kind of stuff that you try. If you if you end up trying to build a service or a product or you know, a device. You better know what it's going to do. If you keep adding stuff to it. You'll never, you'll never finish.
Yeah, yeah, for sure. And all that. I think everything that I've worked on today have been, you know, kind of personal projects are just like, side projects that I've built to either automate things that that need automating. And so, anytime I'm, I'm in the danger of scope, or feature creep, it's because of myself, like it's because I'm like, Oh, I really wish it could do this now. And so then I'm like, Okay, well, I'm all in let's let's do this. I think. I think building software for like, for another person is a whole different ballgame. Oh, yeah. Like I always find that the projects that I build are never complete. Like I'm never gonna I'm always gonna want okay, like I needed to do one more thing.
Yeah, I think the entrepreneur me always kind of says like, you know, if you build for yourself first you kind of maybe empathize with the user a little bit more, and you kind of know when you can stop. Yeah, so I have built a lot of different tools on software. So at that, sure, you know, when somebody is going to kind of introduce this new idea, what if we take this design and do this, like, you've just backtracked us 50% of the steps so that we can add in this extra feature or someone that and like, you've got to, we got to be very thorough when you plan stuff, otherwise, it can be, I call it like dogfooding, your own code or your own projects. And with that, like if you design it for yourself, or you're the user of this thing, you focus on like the real world effects or like aspect of it afterwards.
Well, like in, in software, pretty easy to go back. And like, man, now I want this thing to email me like, I can go add that in, like in yalls. Experience, like physical boards are physical boards, like, yeah, what do you do when, like, if I come back, and I'm like, You know what, I know, I said that I wanted five inputs on my barbecue controller PCB board. But now I want 10.
So I actually I've got two projects. One's a personal project, and one was for old company I used to work for. So the I'll talk about the company when I was making the DC motor controller that was all analog. And this is actually I was working with Chris, who's the co founder over at macro fab. We were working. It was a company called dynamic perception. We built motor controllers and camera equipment. Oh, that's crazy stuff. And anyways, we wanted a Anil all analog motor controller. And so I built him one, Rev. One, it worked. And then he was like, I need this feature. And I'm like, we don't have hardware for that. Because there's no microcontroller program. It's all analog. It's on like, so I added that in respond the board two weeks later, got it in. You know, it'd be really cool if it had this feature. On the board two weeks later, eight times eight. Yeah, we finally got to where we wanted. And we actually went back a rev, because that feature we added didn't work quite right in analog and couldn't get tweaked in, right. But yeah, it was the first rev worked for the initial design specs, and then the design spec change at times.
Kind of what you were talking about earlier, what do you do with hardware, you have two routes with hardware. You do Parker, the way he was doing it, and you re spin the entire board and go two weeks, or you dead bug everything and have a whole bunch of nasty wires?
I had to add in like, all new chips to handle this this stuff.
Yeah, yeah. So So basically, you hack it in. And it looks like a really nasty engineering, with all kinds of good stuff hanging off.
I'll put some pictures up on the blog about a controller because yeah, I'm actually pretty proud of how it progressed through all its iterations. I think Matt was about to say something. Oh, I
was just gonna ask like, you know, ultimately, how did you come to decision to, you know, kind of step back or some of that I'm sure there's a lot of context in there.
Oh, I'm often the last rep to go back. And it was the the, the feature we added just didn't I think it was, I can't remember the exact feature, but it just didn't function. 100% Correct. And so a user might be confused by that weird, quirky behavior that it had. So it was useful, but it might confuse user if if they didn't fully understand how that function works. Yeah, totally.
Yeah. So I, I got actually a really great example of feature creep. So the Gosh, when I first started on at macro fab, I actually presented a kind of an idea on a project to Parker, because both of us are home brewers. And I wanted to build I wanted to build a controller like like a brewing controller, but really fairly simple one at the beginning. And and so I do a style of brewing. In wood, there's, there's a portion where you steep grains, and you basically turn it into a tea
go on. We're listening.
I do a style of brewing, that's called Fly sparging, where you re circulating water inside of a pot. The rate at which you Reese circulate this water has an impact on the end result, how much sugar you pull off the grains. So I bought a flow sensor, so I can monitor how fast the water is flowing. Well, I also kind of wanted to monitor the temperature. So I was like, Okay, well, I'll add temperature monitoring to this. But you don't want to go so much that your pH gets off. So I wanted to add a pH monitor to it. But I also wanted it to be intelligent and have a valve that automatically opens and make sure that the water goes that route. And I was like well But the pot should be controlled electrically so that it can warm up electrically. Yeah. And if I'm already doing that, then the next pot in the line, it should also be controlled electrically. I was like, well, I should also build a GUI that has a touchscreen, so I can control this automatically. And it should have all these and then I realized I was like, I'm never gonna make this project. So actually, Parker and I had a discussion earlier this week, and I was like, You know what, I'm gonna back it all off. And I'm gonna make the flow sensor. Yeah. And that's it. It's just gonna be
all the features that we'll have. And then stopped. It has like three of those things. Yes, yes.
Yeah. Because I ended up and I even went so far as like, I wanted it to be inside of an industrial box. And I wanted it to have like, all kinds of like, just crazy controls and and and I started adding the features and then even further adding up how much that cost to add those features. I was like, Oh, God, this is a huge
personal project.
Yeah. And that was like eight months ago that I dreamed it up. And I still haven't done it. I have a flow sensor sitting in my laundry room, because I haven't done anything with it. I just
had a funny thought you were kind of like, using our Slack or instant message or text message or someone that I message any kind of tells you when someone is typing. Yeah, you've written out this long message you like Nerman?
Yeah, absolutely.
I do the same thing. Would you like arguing with someone on the internet and you have this like, huge paragraph, you're like, oh, what's the fucking point? That was me on a daily basis. Yeah. No, no problem.
This isn't gonna go anywhere.
I had like the opposite kind of experience, not feature creep, but sort of like I had to figure out what the features were. So Brian and I actually made this kind of cloud is Internet of Things Cloud that that sits in the Houston office for the vineyard. And it hangs in the entryway. Right. And like, we are actually a physical cloud. It's a physical cloud. Okay. Yeah, it's like Aussie, and it lights up and everything. And like, I saw something that kind of inspired me to do this and was literally some Nelson made something, some web firm in like Australia, I can't remember where. But I was looking at it and they kind of released this video. It shows like, here's, here's a cloud this thing is amazing. It it like, responds to tweets, and then like fluxes and things. I was like, Oh, that's really cool. And I found this video of them they posted but not really shared was like how we made it. And you ever seen those like drawing tutorials where it's like how to draw a horse, right, draw the body, draw the legs and draw the rest of the bleeping horse, right.
There's a circle and here's the rest of the
show like it was a bit like that. Although I was like the recap video had these little millisecond frames and they did kind of show some tools sitting around right they had CSOD C clamps like some special kind of adhesive glue, that's a spray on glue, vinyl table cover. They literally like tore up a pillow and took the like the pillow fill out of it the polyester fibers and they had we
did have to get the parts list by pausing the video Yeah.
I couldn't find anybody else doing something like this. It looked everywhere high and low. And then and then what was the glue that was pointless the acrylic glue glue. Okay, so like we we saw acrylic rod and I was like okay, where do I buy acrylic rods? You definitely can't get them from Amazon. So I had to go and find a special distributor that can give me acrylic rods which is like no, this plastic hollow tubing. Yeah. And then we had to kind of figure out how to frame this thing. So I had to come up with like, how much how much length acrylic rods to get, which wasn't that much harder for easy math. But like I ended up kind of I couldn't see the structure they put into this internal framing for us I basically came up with the structure myself to kind of intertwined rectangles and prisms. So we ended up doing that we cut the the rods as much as we could right like the acrylic is extremely brittle and nobody tells you this they had like a handsaw and like it just crumbled when we were doing this so it was it was awful because he just started like splintering. It was like oh, god I need I need gloves and a lot of stuff to talk about. And then as we like we saw our acrylic glue and so that's like oh, they must be using the acrylic glue we found the heaviest kind we let it sit for like six or eight hours. It didn't solidify apparently takes like 24 or 48 hours and you're supposed to apply multiple layers. So like we had the sequence and I was like screw it I don't have I'm not interested in sitting here waiting around for it and I like maybe bad on my part but So Brian, I were just like we bought a heat gun. Let's just melt it together. An hour an hour later Brian's laying down on the couch
it was a night I don't feel great right now.
Like, it's, I gotta take a break. So I kept going on it, and I just ended up, you know, kind of like figuring out how to kind of get the rest of the frame together and stuff like that. They didn't really tell us about the lights. That was when they're shooting part they kind of like mentioned that maybe there's some humans involved when they make when you buy Hue lights, they didn't use to ship as like just the or they only ship as the bowl. I don't know if they chip now with like, the the socket as well, we had to go and like figure out what the socket was that they were kind of putting up in around this frame. Instead, I found that LED strip lights, I was like, Oh, this is great. But it's kind of expensive, like 200 bucks. Yeah. So I found the strip baits. And of course, there was a whole like software side of this too. So we got the cloud together, like just glued all the polyester pillow fill to like a vinyl table cover and wrapped it around the thing and hung it from the ceiling. And it looks pretty legit. It actually looks really cool. But the the end result was like we had to get the software going. And Hue lights has a separate puck. Like it's a totally separate little thing that's internet connected. So you if you want to live stream tweets, there's there's good luck, you can't do that unless you have another running server on the same LAN that can like do network pushes to it. So we didn't really want to do that at the time. So there is a cloud API. But Philips in the Hue lights team was not responding to like my million email requests to get access to this like remote API. So I can like run a server on Heroku and just like push updates to it. So I had to just use it this and that, which like aggregates a bunch of messages every like 10 or 15 minutes and then does a bunch of color changes all at once. So it is like a big strip like that is color changes and stuff like that. You just can't like livestream it so I'm working on a second version. But it just, you know, I'm gonna do some stuff with like a Raspberry Pi or Arduino or something like that in the middle. Just kind of does that.
So we get pictures of that thing. Oh, totally. I got I got tweets. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yes, we will put that in blog posts. Yeah, that sounds awesome. Same thing with the barbecue, pictures. I want pictures. I want the barbecue pictures. And I want a picture of brisket and a taste test as well.
Yeah,
I actually I was I was proud enough like I knew that I was kind of as the the process go went while I was building it. Like I went ahead and pictures and documented like what I was doing because I knew I was either going to be like super proud of it. Or I was going to be so pissed. Look at all this stuff that I left up.
Okay, I think it's worth saying you are more than welcome to come. Have a tour of Mac rabbit anytime you want. You just have to bring brisket. Know what that is? That couldn't be more.
Be more get in Brisbane for 18 people.
You can ask Matt like, give me an excuse to get that's all I need.
I will show up with the meets Tuesday.
Literally every office, we have a halfway BBQ celebration for our classes. Brian does brisket. So Oh, that's
awesome. Awesome. All right, I guess we talk a lot about feature creep. Crazy. Um, so next thing on the list is the Hackaday is apparently advising the United Nations. So we know that explain this. Steven. Yeah, so.
Okay, so I guess what it's called the Convention on rights of persons with disability is being held this week at the United Nations. Yeah, in New York. So So I guess it's just a giant convention discussing disabilities. And what's actually happening is there's a discussion going on now about technology and how that can aid people with disabilities. And what's cool is the United Nations is actually referencing Hackaday. So Hackaday is getting to the point now where they're respected enough where their opinion counts,
and they actually have someone giving a I can't remember the person who heads up Hackaday. Yeah, one of the one of those guys is actually has a seminar at this event. Yeah. So that's kind of impressive. I guess. It's really cool. And
what's what I think is super awesome about all this is the hacker maker community involves a bunch of guys who do have degrees, but it also involves a bunch of people who are just guys who mess around in their, in their kitchen or their basement or whatever. And what's what's cool about it is you don't necessarily have to work at a research facility nowadays, to have a good idea and get it out there to a bunch of people. And it gives a lot of power to people who have these wonderful ideas and Hackaday is kind of the outlet through which they're they're making that happen, which I think it's awesome. Super thumbs up on that.
Now. I've heard of some like really neat things coming out. You know, you guys are familiar with Maker Faire. People. I have seen some technology Geez, come out where people are trying to do things for people with disabilities. Yeah, at Maker Faire. Are they also consulting with Maker Faire on these types of items?
You know, I It's probably ends up being one giant conglomerate. You know, I bet you the UN is like, Who do we talk to? So they just go like Hackaday looks good. I mean, I wouldn't be surprised
if they did when they pick Reddit than right. It's got a huge community.
Reddit. Yeah, no, Reddit is a let me see here. I wrote down. I've got I got a quote that I came up with earlier. And I got it. I got it. Oh, yeah. Reddit is the toilet where information goes on the internet? I forgot about that. Yeah.
I just hope they don't ask the people in the Hackaday comments. For advice. That would
be terrible. Yeah. Would be a destructive.
So bad as long as we can downvote there.
Oh, boy. Yeah. Never pull the internet for anything. You guys aware of it? No.
Okay, that's great. You describe it will probably you talked about on the previous podcast?
Basically, it was a it was a what a new navy ship, a new
research vessel. Name was Yeah.
Or the the infamous Mountain Dew naming challenge or whatnot that that one was pretty bad.
We have an online platform with the learner. We have students that I have accounts through now. Yeah. And I made a demo account line show new instructors and stuff and the person's name is testing make techspace.
Awesome. Oh, I was good. So it's cool that Hackaday is, you know, getting that kind of recognition? Yeah,
I think so too. I think it it's, it shows an air of legitimacy. Like, yeah, we're not just toy makers. We just play around,
I would say Hackaday is probably one of the forefront in terms of these are who makers are and what they do. Yeah, Maker Faire is another example of that. And but I would say make it free doesn't have a huge, they have made calm. I don't think they have such a huge online presence as make Hackaday does. Because Hackaday has got that cool project section section. Yeah, all that stuff now. Well, and
they just they just completely scan the Internet for awesome. So I mean, they're they're technology aggregator. So
yeah, yeah, no, it's really cool. Just the fact that like, you, you're a developer, for example, and you go to, like, long, long, long blog posts, those are always the most timeless pieces that can help you out. Right, my my first thing I remember referencing from Hackaday was installing the open WRT or open DDT. firmware for like the old Linksys routers. Yeah. Right to kind of like, help make my router not die all the time.
Yeah. Cool. Yeah. So, uh, Brian, you haven't said an opinion about this yet?
No, I mean, I think it's great. Like, I really do. Like, I feel as though I'm giving, you know, showing an air of legitimacy. Like, it makes me feel good as a, because I'm not I'm in no way a professional. Right? I am in that, like, very much hacker maker community. But, you know, like, I'm not, I'm no longer like it, it feels good. Because I'm no longer just like some dude who likes to geek out on trying to putting things together, right. Like, there's a, you know, people are actually paying attention at this point. And I think that's pretty neat.
So it gives an era of like legitimacy, you know, like long standing, let's say civil engineers, electric engineers, mechanical engineers, there's always like, these governing bodies that kind of like, here's your certification program, and like, long standing terms, and then software comes along, and there's people who just like, Oh, I'm gonna make a language or I'm gonna make a library. And that's sort of like, not as timeless to some people. But then there's sort of like this rapid development process that comes with like the iterations that produce nowadays, like in software world, you've got all sorts of languages that are really, really powerful and do so much for you. So I think that's sort of like the same things people have like massively iterated on these ideas from like, Hackaday where, you know, they've taken this to Maker Faire and then suddenly there's, you know, a project or products on like, Product Hunt or something and all of a sudden, this person's running a multimillion dollar business from this idea they had three years ago. Yeah.
Well, it's funny I was actually having breakfast earlier this morning with with a good friend of mine.
eats breakfast in the morning. Yeah.
Thanks marker. But I was having breakfast with him and we were discussing some some interesting stuff. And one of the things we were talking about was even 1520 years ago, the way you got information was you went to the library. Yeah. And you had to just research stuff, or you had to create it yourself. But there was like an era of mysticism when you went over to your neighbor's house. And you saw this weird thing that he was working on. And it was like this cool project. And the only place you could get information about that is his location is his home or wherever, you know, there was like this weird, like magic behind all of that nowadays. Hackaday is kind of like that, you know? Hackaday is that place where the magic exists?
Yeah. The internet in general. Like a couple years back, I went and did a head swap on my jeep. I just looked up a YouTube video. Yeah. And, and I bought all the parts on Amazon. They showed up two days later. Yeah. And that weekend, I did a head swap. Right, right. Yeah. And I've never, I never did that. I mean, I've yeah, I've, you know, changed my brakes. Oil changes all that stuff. I never did something like tear my engine apart. I still drive that car. Yeah. And you weren't afraid of doing that? No, I'm like, right. It showed you everything you can do. And it's like, okay, if you had this year, you have to do this x thing because it's slightly different. Yeah. All this crazy stuff.
But something we have to remember though, and I think this is important. That information exists only because somebody made the decision to make that information. Yeah, that's so we have to be the people who also make that information for somebody else who
wants it. Yep. Yeah. For our field. Right. Yeah.
Right. Yeah. I don't have a barbecue controller right now. Unless, oh, boy in Florida, made the effort to publish these step by step directions. Yeah.
It's something where, like, you have this super. To me, it's like this moment of silence and respect for that person. Because it's like, here they did this research and toyed with the same for a month, three months, a year. And then took the time to write this extremely extensive thing. blog posts or otherwise that included maybe even source code or something like that. Yep.
And you're sitting there thank you Viper 298
XKCD
Yeah, yeah. Like I get people like email me like, you know, like King thank you for posting this video and like that post that video like 10 years ago, I've completely forgotten about that project. Yeah, and it just feel like it like makes your heart grow three sizes larger.
Yeah. Or like you find you find something on your computer that's acting up and you search for that one file online and there's like, you know, a post of a guy who's like if you need to fix blah blah blah do XYZ you're like oh god thank you. Thank you so much
worse is the worst is when you search for stuff and you get dead form links where there's a guy who's just like please help
me respond
and then in the thread is marked solved Yeah, yeah go through the whole thing is no solution. What did you
fix it and he's like, nailed it. I'll post tomorrow how I did it and then there's no second
account inactive
I will never know you Viper
Delete Account. Yeah. Awesome.
Okay. Sorry. We've been talking about a lot of IoT. And apparently an IoT device won the America's greatest maker contest that I IBM was until, until until until until sponsored they won a million dollars it's an IoT toothbrush play a video game with called the
grush crush is it which stands for gaming toothbrush or just game toothbrush. So apparently it has like accelerometers and things in it so it can it can actually monitor your tooth brushing sure action. And and depending on how you utilize it, you can attack like enemies on the screen, man. Yeah, like the like gingivitis and tooth decay. Will you link it up to one of your smart devices so your phone or your tablet? Ah, and you see like this cartoon image of a disgusting mouth and you have to eliminate all the enemies of my eye.
Like an HTC Vive, so its head and their tooth, like
beating themselves in the face with
this machine. I'll say this as as a father of a four year old who getting her to brush her teeth twice a day. Is sometimes like moving mountains. If this is marketed towards kids, I am all and like I couldn't be more all in because she's already into. She's already into, you know, like, everything tech, like but they it's like fish to water. Like I, I 100% do this. I'd be on board with this cool. Yeah.
Do you guys know anything about like what the runners up for this award were? Oh,
I'm not sure I'd have to look at the article for this. And I'm like,
oh, that's IoT. We
got it. Yeah. And because of this, it, it's a cool idea. It's a little bit ridiculous, but it's a cool idea. I thought we'd play a quick little game. Alright, and the game is you have to come up with a ridiculous IoT game. And and and I came up with a game and even it's cheating. I'm cheating because I came up with one a while ago, but I legitimately came up with it. It's written down on tea. Yeah, it's called it's an IoT toilet game called Bombs away. I can't believe I'm actually doing this. But no, you play this game on the toilet and it has a microphone and and you have to defeat the enemies. Let's put it that way.
You know when you have to potty train your kids. Sure. Yeah, go
the you could also call it that that charges the the hunt for the brown October so anyone else have some IoT game? I do?
I would. Okay, so um, I don't know how great this would be to help with road rage but something to help as a commuter. I think something along the lines of of some gamifying your your commute into work would be pretty cool. Like I'd be I
would monitor how you're driving. Maybe Maybe it's you're less aggressive, you get more points,
maybe or lane changes. And
you know, it'd be cool if it
just blurs in your blinker
and maybe there's like a non safe mode where it's like, the more you can swerve in and out of traffic the more points you get. Like that sounds like
you said lanes were right about like Blink and drink you
pop a towel but but a heads up display on your dash would be on your actual windshield would be cool. If you could like shoot other cars like that would be awesome. And it would tweet out or give you points and deliver what you've shot 500 cars on your toy
just shoot the slow lane the slow person in the fast lane shoot them
that would that would cure road rage.
Right cuz like somebody cuts you off on the road and you get angry as well even and then you're like, wait Uber aggressive. Yeah, so like the HUD. I love the idea of maybe just like, like a Thai fighter similar and like, just kind of like get some of those sounds in there that that would actually be pretty awesome. Cuz I'd be like, yeah, yeah, if I was Luke Skywalker right now you would be gone. So there we go. There's the name. Gonzos
Gonzos. I like it. I like
it. And you get like five of them in a row. You unlock? Don't get too cocky.
One in a million for the famous quote. That's a good one. 1,000,001 million. Yeah, that's good.
You're driving home. That's not a moon. It's a space station
to call a coach bus.
I mean, I'd love for there to be some kind of way that like at least maybe it counts the number of potholes that you run over on your bicycle, you know, like
we got a flat tire.
Actually a an app on your phone where we detected a jar that was strong enough to register as a pothole, and it automatically open up loaded up to that Houston 311 thing? Yeah.
That'd be that'd be awesome. And
automatically does that because they're supposed to fix those potholes within 20 Do you realize how
fast their database would fill up? Yeah. Stack Overflow all the time.
Set up to a normal server that filters out the results for the same location.
That would be cool if it gave like a histogram that showed this pothole gets hit you know 400,000 times a day. Yeah, fix it.
I like the this would turn into like an advertisement for like the the best I don't know, like no SQL database provider or something like Amazon RDS.
You know, we're giving away really good ideas for free. These ideas. Thumbs up. Yeah, please. Please someone
fix or take idea attribution someone?
Someone make dunzo please.
That would be fun. Any other any other ideas? No. No, I think those were
pretty good toilet balm and Gonza we're good
pothole fixer. Yeah. Awesome.
Okay, cool. Um, I guess we'll have our guests do the outro
Yeah, absolutely. Well, this has been the macro fab podcast and thank you for joining me. I am Matt keys.
And I am Brian Dorton.
And we were your hosts Parker Dohmen.
And Steven Craig. We'll catch you next time. Take it easy.
Bye bye.
John Adams joins Parker and Stephen to discuss IoT Security, Crappy IoT Devices, and WS2812B LEDs.
Parker talks with Brandon Satrom of Particle about the future of IoT and then design and prototype an IoT device.
Agustin Pelaez and Cameron Klotz of Ubidots talk about what is IoT and how to start an IoT Project.