Danny Rankin, an instructor at the University of Colorado Boulder, returns to the podcast to discuss education during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Atlas Institute
Whaaat!? And BTU lab
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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 am your guest, Danny Rankin,
and we are your hosts Parker Dolman
and Steven Craig.
This is episode 171
Danny Rankin is an instructor in the technology Arts and Media tipm program at the University of Colorado Boulder. Both the courses he teaches and as individual research reflect a diverse array of expertise including graphic design, material fabrication, game design, hardware, hacking, sustainable agriculture, and large scale installation art. Rankin co directs the Atlas wat lab, a space for experimental game and interaction design. His cooperative card game ravine, which began in a tam game design class later became one of the most popular card game Kickstarters of 2017. alongside Matt and Lisa bethancourt. He is the CO creator of busy work, which won the 2017 IndieCade media Choice Award in 2018. Both games were selected for exhibition at the XOXO festival. Rankin also mentors in the Atlas be to you Lab, which stands for blow things up. He holds a Master of Science from the Atlas CTD program and a Bachelor of Arts in environmental studies from CU Boulder.
So what does CT D stand for?
Yeah. It stands for Creative Technologies and design. So it's basically kind of a design within kind of creative engineering discipline. And you know, people get mad about being like, well, all engineering is creative, but specifically around development of creative tools and helping artists and content creators use fancy stuff. So a lot of my focus in my master stuff was like, making weird art with technology in it. That's as general as it gets.
Well, that was quite a bit of a mouthful of a description there.
You're welcome. I wrote. I mean, someone fancier than me wrote that, but not they made me write that.
Well, I have to admit, that was a direct rip from from your words off of the website. Which, which, what we do 50% of the time, yeah. Congratulations.
So Danny, that's what you have done. But who are you?
Yeah. So I I grew up in Colorado, I joined the military at a high school. I was a farsi linguist and the Air Force, musician. Kind of a long time coming. Both my parents are artists and designers. They have their own business, making signs. So like storefront signage, so I got into fabricating stuff when I was a kid, basically sanding letters and painting, you know, big signage pieces and kind of installing big storefront signage, oh, growing up, and then did entail stuff in the military for six years, got out and taught music for a while, worked in an Apple store for a while, went back to school, finished my undergrad and then I had already been teaching some graphic design stuff for a while. So I just kind of hung out at CU until someone let me teach a class and then they had to give you a job at that point. Yeah, basically, I started teaching one class and then I guess they liked what I was doing. So now they let me teach a bunch of classes. And I work here full time now but yeah, other than that, I do a bunch of I kind of get bored easily so I thought for a long time was gonna be a farmer. I did a bunch of thesis work on like, little robots for agriculture, and I'm a musician and I like building you know, music technology. You know, electrocuting myself? So I think that's a prerequisite for the people on this podcast probably right.
I think we've talked multiple times about shock stories. Actually, we
can go into that right now. Danny, what is your the worst? Worst time you ever? I wouldn't say electrocuted because you would be dead. Yeah. Shocked yourself had a current pasture a small section of my body that did not result in Udine.
One time I was you know, it's all pretty classics. It's not anything really glamorous. I was on a on a ladder. And I was trying to unwire a light because I hated these lights that were in my previous office that we were working in. And the facilities maintenance people wouldn't let me turn the breaker off. So I was like Maybe if I insulate myself really well, and stand on this fiberglass ladder, and try not to touch both wires at the same time. I can I can disconnect this wire and the rewired into these track lights that I was trying to study. Basically just nobody lets us do anything ourselves. They always wanting us to like, have the university come in and have a contract or do it or whatever. And I'm never really happy with the work they do. So I get fed up with these things climbing to the ceiling. And that day I did that. And I touched two wires together, locked my arm out and pushed myself off the ladder under the ground. Super exciting. So
that was what say what part of that process failed. And it was the touch two wires part.
Yeah, now we're getting to that point, everything was working really well. Everything was like I had already rewired the lights, I got them apart without getting shocked. Everything was great. And then I was just like putting a wire net back on to reconnect the wires and the little conduit box that was up there. And somebody was like, Hey, Danny, and I went, Oh, yeah. wasn't too bad. It was only a couple feet up in the air. And I kind of like fell down. But it wasn't tremendous, a little fuzzy feeling in that hand for a day or two. Cheers to that. And
so you you spend most of your time working in the Atlas Institute, correct?
Yeah, I work in the Atlas Institute, which is kind of this weird. Nobody really knows what it does. Because it's supposed to be this super interdisciplinary thing, which it is, it's part of the Engineering Department at CU Boulder. But it's an institute that was originally set up to kind of house faculty and students and research projects that don't fit neatly into any boxes, to say, so we've got, you know, artists who do art with code. And we have people that do tech tattoos. So they're mixing like mechanical engineering with, you know, human biology. And we have people that do weird, interactive textile design for both art and function. And it's a cool mixture of folks. But it's definitely a lot of people that probably their whole careers felt like they didn't fit in anywhere else. But they're wicked smart, and they do some cool projects, and I'm lucky to get to hang out and absorb some of their smarts via osmosis.
You know, I was I always felt that the engineering program that I went through in Parker can probably echo this, but it's just so damn rigid and stiff, there's there isn't room for creativity, and there isn't room for the ability to just go do something you want to do. Even the labs were, you know, locked unless you were in the right class that had the right code for that, you know, lab to go do those things. So it's really refreshing to see something or a location where people can, you know, merge the two, like the art and technology and, and creativity on top of that, totally, it's,
it's a weird place. And it's a great place. And, you know, we have an engineering program here, which is super great. Like it does really great work and turns out good students, but it is very much within those kind of rigid boundaries. And we kind of attract a lot of those students that get a little burned by that sort of environment, they don't feel like they necessarily want to take that path. So they come to Atlas, and they find that there's a lot of other students that feel that way, on that on that downside, and, you know, not gonna rip on engineers, like engineers. But a lot of the time, there's this like grouchy, like well, you're not doing the real thing, because you didn't have to sit around and do three semesters of this dumb circuit design bullshit, and you don't know what it's like. And we're like, Well, we made a sculpture that lights up. It was fun. And, and we kind of get a lot of a lot of guff from some engineering, but but I think it's a lot of it is birthed out of good natured jealousy of being like a wish I had been making sculptures that lit up. So yeah. I don't I don't hold that against it too much.
I have a story like that. Where I was, uh, I went to University of Texas, and I was, I worked for the Eee department. And so I was actually delivering, I guess, boxes of paperwork somewhere. And I went next to the communications department building. And I saw a lady and she had a puppy and I'm like, Why does someone have a puppy? So I asked her and they had show Intel. Yes. Even college I was just so blown away by the fact that the show and tell at college I was just like, that doesn't make any sense. Which was I want to show and tell so I can bring my dog
exactly right. Like, your first reaction is like, that's not college. You're not doing college and then secretly you're like, I wish that I wish I had shown until Yeah. Like, no and that's the totally the vibe from a lot of these. They're like, well, your students like the TAM program is a bachelor science and engineering, but it's very cross disciplinary. So we basically, their engineering chops have to be pretty high and most of them it's computer science type chops, although some people are more into the certain Building the mechanical stuff. But then they have to mix that up with some creative aesthetic work and a lot of like critical social perspective work. And that's kind of the big thing that we try and mix into the the undergrad is that they don't just learn some sort of, you know, trade, so to speak within engineering, like you're not just mastering a particular engineering discipline. They're figuring out the why behind it and how to use it for weird stuff or for artistic stuff, too.
So what kind of degree do you get out of the Atlas program then?
So yeah, we have a whole kind of menu, we got a certificate in Creative Technologies, which is kind of open to all majors like regardless of what college you're housed in, and a minor which is really similar minor in technology, Arts and Media, which is kind of like an additional thing that anybody from any discipline from arts and humanities to business finance, can can jump in on. And then we have a Bachelor of Science and Technology, Arts and Media, which is pretty new. But we've got I guess, we started two and a half years ago, and we've got about 300 students in that. And then we have a couple of master's programs, the Creative Technologies and design program that I went through a while back, and then another one called trying to it's ICTD there's so many acronyms, acronyms made me feel insane, y'all. Y'all went to engineering school engineers, a lot of acronyms, and
I was dropping another one. Another acronym. So what do you think of? What's the one? Science Technology stem? So what how does Atlas fall into Borstein?
Yeah, I mean, I am so tired of people being like, this is important, because I'm like, yeah, obviously, it's important. That was big on that, right? Like, especially the A in the steam thing, like being like, Yeah, we really think the arts is super important into that mixture. But I don't even know that we would just say like, we like this stem world. It's a hot, it doesn't matter. Yeah, it's we look at we have researchers that work in Atlas that do specifics on K 12, STEM education, especially in like underserved communities. And that's a big part of what atlases original mission was about was basically like expanding learning opportunities, and basically mixing technology into all these other places. But you know, 10 years on technology is already mixed into all these other places. So you can be like, yeah, we've got steam, it's great. But like, it's not that special to say that anymore. It should just be a given that we're trying to make that happen. There should be like, to me, what's missing is the critical piece, like, what's going to get made with the technology to develop? Do you agree with the ethical implications of the stuff you're developing, we have so many computer science students that come through, and they're like, I'm gonna make a disruptive app, or I'm gonna make a I don't know why they would southern accent example, but I want to, I'm gonna make a Facebook or Twitter or whatever. And I'm like, please, don't we? I don't feel like we even need the ones we have, right? The new Facebook and Twitter, can we can you invent something and get rid of the existing ones? But that's just my grouchy. oldness. But yeah, there's a lot of Atlas, which is trying to mix some of that critical stuff in. And that's, that's actually the place where I do the most of that is in games, because a lot of students come in and they're like, I want to make video games because I love video games, which is a great way to attract students, but then we make them play dumb art games and weird, like social critique games, and we make them spend a whole semester doing nothing but making pen and paper tabletop games. And yeah, we nothing like Call of Duty, right? Yeah, no, we weed out the kids that just want to make a first person shooter in that first semester. Pretty quick. So
so so you actually teach a whole class on game design? Right?
Yeah, we actually have now so we just met bethancourt, who's the co director of this the lab was good pronunciation on the lab there, Steven these Yeah, the the elongated A's are important. Also, that's not an acronym. That's just the name of the lab.
Well, there were there were three A's in there. So I figured I had
to. It's important.
But yeah, so we run this kind of experimental Games Lab. And we've gotten it to where we're trying to make it almost like a track within Tam. So we have like three coming up on four courses that are all game related. There's a design and a development sequence. So you do like the theory of games and then you do hard like digital development stuff. And then we have a critical perspectives, which is like games as social critique games as art games as media. It's like a media studies, one. And then one of our really good friends who works in a different lab, which if you all are ever up here, you need to check this place up. It's called the Media Archaeology Lab, which is on campus and all they do is keep old computers and video game systems operating so you can like play old media from the 60s and 70s and 80s. And she He's trying to run a class right now called an experimental history of digital video games, which is another like, history and Media Studies elective where you basically play old video games for like a whole semester and just write and talk about it. And then like best course idea, ever,
that sounds like when you're a kid, and you want to become a game tester, but the actual life of a game tester is pretty miserable. Yeah, it sounds like that. I want to play video games. And then you have to write like, a 10 page paper on it
exactly. Once again, they're just trying to weed out people that don't really love suffering. Because that's the whole key to any of this, right? It's
like, that's what college is suffering.
That's the other thing is it like why engineers get bent out of shape about us being like Shawntel and lightup sculptures, they're like, you haven't suffered, like, I've suffered for this, like,
you know, it's funny. It's funny, because as you keep going, what's going through my head is just the entire time. It's like, when you're developing a new course, it's almost like the first requirement is like, what would piss off a really traditional engineer, let's test that, you know?
Yeah, we're all about that. People off the whole blow things up lab, like, that's why the lab is named that because we just like to take people's ideas of what a space should be, or a program should be and kind of, you know, detonate it. And also because people literally destroy a lot of stuff in the lab, which is fine.
That's, that's, that's awesome. So you actually run those labs, right?
So the wet lab? Yes, the BT lab. I did for a while in different capacities. And now I just kind of my office is in here, like, it's where I'm at right now. And I kind of unofficially am a lab grown up, I guess it's probably the best way to put it. I hang out and find out when people are breaking things and stop them from breaking them. Hopefully,
I was about to say what is the most dangerous thing? It's honestly in the Atlas PTU lab,
not that dangerous. I mean, the equipment load is actually pretty small. I mean, there's some 3d printers, there's a big laser cutter, there's a small bed CNC, and there's a woodshop, you know, tablesaw, bandsaw, belt sander, that kind of stuff. But it's all packed into a really small space, that is really not set up well, for that it wasn't designed to be a woodshop was designed to be a computer lab, and then they're like, we should put you in this space. And we're like, Well, okay, it's more square footage. But there's not great ventilation, and there's not a lot of room. So really, the danger is other human beings. Those are the most dangerous things. In the btn most dangerous game unaware students basically it's the most dangerous equipment. Yeah, they're just like, do you think I can use a soldering iron to tattoo my body? Absolutely. Should you I'm not sure. But I sign this waiver first. Yeah. And that's it, the BT lab is very open ended. Like you compare it to a lot of even like, community hackerspaces that aren't, you know, university based. There's a lot of rules and it's pretty structured. And here it's very, very open, I wouldn't say frustratingly open, but it does leave a lot of room for mistakes and, and learning through blowing stuff up. And it's different than we have a great Makerspace on the other side of campus called the idea Forge. very tightly regulated.
I thought you were gonna say we have a great nurse that's like, right across. Oh, no. Yeah, we
have a first aid kit. Like say,
what do you call a carpenter that learns by his mistakes? His name is nine finger Joe in the
head finger Joe? Or maybe fewer? Yeah, right. I don't know the clinic's like a block away. It's fine. We've had one major injury in like four years. And that guy's dad was a plastic surgeon and sodas handbag together without any fees. So it worked out great. And that's not a joke that at all a truce, do
you know what, let's wait, let's wheel it back for a second because we're kind of painting a little bit of a dark light on.
Like, honestly, the reason that our philosophy is all student led, since we just think that's a really good way for certain types of students to feel like they can approach engineering and circuit building and hacking. Without, you know, this kind of intimidating layer to the front. Some people respond fine to that, right. They're like, I'll jump through the hoops. And I will check the box and go to the class and learn all the things and some people like, I'm not even going to try and I think you lose their perspectives if you don't find some spaces to like, kind of coax those people over. And that's a lot of what the BT lab is about. It's going, Hey, you don't feel like you fit in in that world of like, kind of a very stereotypical engineer, whatever. We've got some of the same tools. We've got some of this expertise. We have a lot of people here that that want to help and make weird stuff. Do you want to come hang out here and just Learn how to solder aboard are like learn how to fabricate. And just by given that freedom, we find that we get a very different student base, we get really like Tam and Alison general boasts super high gender parity in terms of engineering programs are like, over 50% female in programs, which is like pretty high for most engineering programs. And I don't know, we just get a lot of people that maybe they started in aerospace, or they started in CES. And then they realized they didn't want to do a career doing that one thing. And they found a place where a bunch of people go, I have 10 careers doing a bunch of little things. And none of them pay me that well, but I add them all up. And I'm happy. And that's, you know, I'm definitely in that boat myself. So I've enjoyed being here.
Very cool. So materials class, I'm really interested in that, because when I hear materials, I think materials science, and I'm pretty much guaranteed that it's not material science, right? It's
not, you know, like, I love material science. And there's a part of me that wants to, to keep that at the forefront. But the real thing of that course does is take a bunch of students that basically do only theoretical digital work, which is a lot of what the the TAM program is, and just makes them do hands on work with wood and metal, ceramics, plastics, even like fiber weaving, and, and kind of mixed material, concrete mineral, they kind of run the gamut and just get their hands on a bunch of different things. And they make a lot of, I don't wanna say bad projects. But I mean, for some, y'all make stuff, you know, the first thing you ever make out of anything is kind of like, you love it. And it's an ugly baby that only a parent could love. And it's definitely true of these projects, like, you know, a lot of pretty bad woodworking can metal. But, you know, the whole point of the course is this, like broader survey. And the big lessons are more like, you know, you may think that you been told your whole life, you should hire somebody else to make this thing for you. But if you're willing to go through being frustrated for a long period of time, and you know, mess stuff up and learn how to use a particular material, you can basically make whatever you want. And not to discount what people that really master a trade do. In fact, most of the opposite, I want to help these students gain an appreciation for what trades are, and the value of those things are, because I think so many students in the universities, for one actually don't want to be here, I think a lot more people would prefer to have gone into a trades career. And I also think that there shouldn't be as much of a boundary between the two, I don't think you should be like, Well, you're a trades person. So you just learn how to do metal or plumbing or woodworking or whatever, you should get to think about interesting stuff. Just because you're a plumber doesn't mean you shouldn't get the opportunity to like hang out and talk about poetry. And on the flip side, just because you're learning computer science or engineering or writing code or making art doesn't mean you shouldn't have to like, get your hands dirty and learn how to weld some stuff together. So that's the motivation of that class. And it's a weird class. I don't know I love what comes out of it. And the students always kind of reflect that. A lot of them find a new hobby, you know, out of it, whether it's learning to weld woodworking here, I have one person that got super weird and I rolly when I was like, we're gonna weave and do embroidery, and learn how to like knit and tie knots and do all this stuff with the fiber work. And now they're like, yeah, actually, I just hang out and knit and do embroidery. This kind of like frat bro. Dude was like, Yeah, dude. I love this image of this frat boy just hanging out at his frat everybody's playing beer pong, and he's just out there, like, embroidering a blanket who flipped beer pong stuff.
hides all his frat bros now have sweaters that he's made.
I know, right? They have like tapestries in the house that are like, crush it. Brah?
Oh, that's great. You know, it's really awesome to hear that. Because what everything that you've been describing here, I think is what is missing from a good traditional engineering degree. Great example, what I went through myself, not once was I required to ever touch or learn about a circuit board not once and I did traditional electrical engineering, I everything that I learned about board stuff I had to do myself. And if if I wasn't doing that on my own, because I had my own projects. I just wouldn't have learned that, you know, and it's ridiculous in my mind.
Yeah, it really it really depends on the programs. When I was going through school, I always complained about oh, why do I have to take English or why do I have to take you know, all these history classes? Well, looking back on it, those are or someone knows, in my opinion was important classes that I took as an engineer, as in, I got to meet, you know, people that were not engineers and talk to them. And I learned how like philosophy classes like, oh, that it teaches you how to think differently in look at other sources and this kind of n that kind of stuff. And I think a lot of engineering programs are missing that kind of stuff as well, it seems that TAM takes it to another level of that kind of experience.
Yeah, for sure. And it's, it's definitely an ongoing experiment. Because, you know, at the end of it, there's sometimes this fear that we're making a lot of like, you know, jack of all trades, but masters of none. But really, our goal is to just make masters of multiple things at once. So rather than me like, you don't really get good at anything, I kind of actually just want to churn out these weird unicorns that are both like really skilled with an engineering skill set. And also think a lot about engineering, like engineering outside of the box, think about arts and culture and how they can kind of like, you know, one of the big things that our director throws around, and I'm a believer in it is that the most interesting stuff happens at the intersections, basically, he says that a lot, which is a good way to look at it. Like, it's not really what's happening in the core of what's expected status quo spaces. It's at the weird spots, that those things overlap. And that's kind of how Atlas is supposed to, to work. And by and large does work, I think it is a pretty cool place to be.
And I actually think it is wrong to think about going to college and special, especially in engineering, especially electrical engineering, specializing in specific fields. You don't know what's gonna happen 10 years after you graduate? What where you end up like, when I came out of college, I went and pulled wire, an oil and gas company. That's not embedded design that I went to school for.
I mean, you know, there's some wire, but otherwise,
yes, it carried electrons. That was the only thing that was similar. Well, okay, so, power electronics, college.
Let's define this real quick. When we say specialization in, in an engineering field, that means that you took like three or four, three hour classes towards something. So that means that you've studied it a little bit more than you've studied everything else. I mean, I'm not going to say I don't want to downplay someone's specialization, but it doesn't mean that you've spent 2000 hours studying something, it means that you've spent 50, you're absolutely right,
exactly. You're never going to be a master of anything coming out of college. And it's unfair for culture, or society, or for students, or parents or anybody to put this burden on a student and say, like, you better be ready to basically be the, you know, running your entire career right out of college and like, No, you're gonna, you're still gonna kind of suck at everything, you're gonna suck slightly less, you're gonna have a little bit of an idea where you're headed. But I mean, you know, it's not fair to expect that university is going to do that, actually, I throw the idea around a lot, I think it's true, we have a lot of computer science and code related projects that come out of here. And I think that code, not as a not as a pejorative at all, is the blue collar career field to the future, like writing codes not going to be this like, specialized fancy, you know, high end job, it's going to be a necessity, and you're going to have to be good at it in order to make it happen. That's gonna be the new trade. Yeah. And a lot of people come into the university, and they ask for that, there they go, I want my kid to leave here and get this high paying co job. And I'm like, they shouldn't you shouldn't pay university tuition. To get those skills, you can get those skills mostly for free. On the internet, you could go to like a six month or one year, incubator program and be ready to rock and colleges are afraid of getting killed by those programs. I'm like, what they shouldn't be trying to compete with that that's a total different pipeline for work, you know, those people are getting trained on a really specific job and going right into the workforce. I think that's awesome. But that's not necessarily the place of what the university is supposed to be doing. And it gets muddled, especially in engineering, because there really isn't a lot of that, at least theoretical specialization, like you're going to be an engineer and you're gonna take this exam, and you're gonna go and work in a cubicle and engineer this shit. And that's true for some people, but it's kind of a miserable existence. For a lot of people. I don't think that's where a lot of people want to end up. Or at least that's not the only place they want to end up lots of, I mean, I love sitting down and spending hours banging out a circuit designer, for me more like modeling and CAD work, but, you know, I also want to do interesting things. And, you know, I don't want to express myself, it feels cliche, but I think a lot of us Students want that too. And it's not fair to just go, you better work hard and be the best and get out there and get a job was cost a lot of money. But yeah, then again, college costs a lot of money. So I don't know the answer.
I don't think anyone does. So I'm curious. You know, we've been talking a lot about your students in what you do for the students. How about you? What are some projects or fun things that you have done?
Yeah, so I do a lot of weird stuff. For a while I was obsessed with pneumatic tubes. I, when I started hanging out in the lab, the first thing I made was this beer fridge that sucks cans of beer out of the fridge and then shoots them around a series of tubes in the room and deposits them on my desk, like two feet from where the fridge is, is really just a laziness machine.
But it shakes them up, right shakeup
explodes on your desk, it's really a bad design. It's a bad invention, I mean, a bad thing. And I've always been interested in in those systems. So in the lab actually hanging out partially my one terminal in my office, but there's a couple others are in the lab. It's a pneumatic ball transfer system that uses color coding to direct where messages go. And it's, it's called the Internet of tubes. It's based on that kind of quote from that. That famous Alaskan senator. Yeah, it was like the internet was like a series of tubes. And we're hanging out drinking. We're like, what if the internet was a series of tubes? And then I was like, what if I could finish grad school by making an internet that's a series. And I did, yeah. It's a funny, barely works, I mean, it, it's got all the problems with the internet, plus all the problems of tubes and pneumatics. So stuff gets broken in it balls, like shattered parts of this system, like letters, it's a level thing, you basically, you can load up to 16 ping pong balls that each have a letter on them. So you can send 16 character messages. And then you put up a colored ball at the top, which determines what like three ports that it gets forwarded to. And there's a little color sensor in this thing. But there's no wired connection from any of the ports, to the center hub, it's just air pressure, it was like old leaf blowers that I got it and put inside of some housings. And then there's just several 100 feet of a mixture of PVC and clear acrylic tubing, it's all kind of done up in weird ways and goes through the walls and ceilings and it's all around the lab. And the colored ball goes in it triggers a gate transfer, and then all of the message balls pass through and the terminal space, which is really cool when it works. And it's also really cool when it doesn't work. Because if it rejects that message, but I call the 404 basically, error, it just sprays ping pong balls out all over the laboratory. And it's just fun. It's fun for me, but all of the people that are like in the lab are just getting hit with ping pong balls that
is that how your is that at the end of the year, your your surveys? class was awesome. I got hit in the head with the ping pong.
Yeah, Danny made made me clean up a lot of balls basically, is pretty much how it works. I don't know, there was a lot of jokes when I was doing this project, like do you have a ball obsession, and I was like, well, obviously I'm obsessed with balls. But I couldn't just say that in my my master's presentation. I have a ball obsession. But there's a lot of jokes about balls that go get passed around the lab. That's probably the biggest fun project that's around here right now. But I've done lots of weird other stuff. A lot of kind of react, I was into like woven branches with lights and sound and kind of these like, tracking where people are. And then it's almost like you have these weird synthetic animal noises and light reactions that occur when people interact with these fake nature scenes. And we also just make a lot of functional stuff around the lab that breaks tables and CNC rigs and various whatever things that's the great thing about the the BT lab is when we say do it yourself, we mean that about almost anything someone has a complaint or like I don't know a little we have a show that I'm just like, cool. Do it yourself. Just make it and if if it. If it breaks, then we'll have somebody else make it next time. But so there's a lot of weird storage solutions, that categorization system of everything like all the labels on everything are way overly literal. They're all like pokey stabby things and you're like let what's in this Oh, pokey stabby things like knives and spiders and stuff. And it's like, it's a very different world than like the very efficient, clean, organized world that I actually sometimes really want to live in that I'm like, Oh, I hang out with engineers like real, like more. What's the word I want to use? Traditional, traditional or Just yeah, traditionals probably the best, but yeah, just people that like things that are clean and organized and the way that things should be, which I love. But as definitely BT lab and sometimes I'm like, Man, you think we could just get some drawers and just label the drawers as like, you know what all the values of the resistors are in the stores? And they're like, I don't know if people will find it. It's kind of insane. Yeah, the director of our lab, actually, Alicia Gibb, she has a degree, she has her master's in library science. So she's all about like, organization and stuff. But yeah, the students that are in the lab, they just kind of winging it as they go along, which is both charming and makes me feel totally insane most the time. So
there's, there's a whole list of the students or I guess, not a complete, or that the projects that the students are working on or have worked on. That's all up on the website, I believe,
yeah, we encourage anybody so that the lab is this community space, people can join, if they live here, and they want to be part of the community, they can apply for membership and kind of get in on the space. If they're students, there's no real cost for them involved with that. And then they get access to the blog. And we basically tell people, Hey, if you're working on a project, go on the blog and just write a blog entry about it, we are very kind of open with that. And yeah, it's definitely not complete, there's a lot of weird half completed stuff hanging out around here. And Atlas tries to do a lot of good documentation of, of quality SR final projects. But the BT lab blog is full of half completed weird projects that people have made. One of my favorite ones that's out there that we just started working on fixing is this cat printer, and they just hacked one of those little Amazon order the thing buttons, you just press the button and it automatically and they read, they redirected it. So now it just finds a Google image search result of a cat, and then it's makes it print out of the printer in the lab. So that's just a button, I press it, a cat comes out of the printer. For a while, there's just like hundreds of black and white images of cats from the internet. Please stop printing cats unless you're gonna take the cats with you.
You don't want to be a cat person.
I know. And you know, you search cat on the internet. You never know if you're actually gonna get a cat. You gotta be careful. The internet's a dangerous place.
It almost sounds like it would be really fun to do a podcast from the lab room, where you just ask students for the ideas that they have. It just have it's actually really good. I made it out. You know, that would be really fun.
Yeah, it's a, you get some pretty weird bizarre stuff. But it all depends on some students come in don't. I think they've been denied their creative muscles for so long. And it takes them a while to realize just how weird we really want them to get. They're like, well, I don't know. I could make a drone that flies in the air and takes pictures of things. I'm like, Nope, that already exists. That's boring. Can you make a drone that I don't know? squirts ketchup all over people, because I'm interested in the ketchup drum. And I'm like, Okay, I gotta make a ketchup. I'm like, I don't know what you can make. Make it. Get weird. I don't know. That's pretty much the recipe right? Just get weirder and weirder projects. I don't want you to be like,
a drone that squirts mayo.
Yeah. Manet's drilling. I mean, I'm not trying to like, that's a war crime. I don't think you're allowed to do that in America. You know, be careful with that ethical research here only. But ya know, there's a there's a club that was formed around trying to wire up a shopping cart to autonomously go to the coffee shop and get coffee and bring it back to the lab. And it never went anywhere. But they did make a lot of weird electric vehicles that we crashed around in the building for a while, which is fun. But autonomous shopping carts, apparently quite difficult.
Who knew? Go figure? So other people can get involved in the lab, right?
Yeah, so people that are community members can apply for membership, the BT Lab website, beachy lab.com. We've got the whole about page which talks about basically application and it's typically just university students, staff, faculty, but we do have some people that are just community members, either like former graduates or people that were around that just want to they still live in Boulder, and they want to come hang out. And as long as people want to be involved and actually be part of the community, we're all on board. The one thing we try and avoid. Were that like, we talked to people if they put on their application, a lot of people like I just want to come in and use the laser cutter and I'm like, well, there's better laser cutters and better spaces for that. Even on campus and in our community. We've got like a couple of really great hackers can isn't necessarily like we've got a place got the idea for it, which is just amazing like way bigger budget way more space, incredible equipment, much more tightly regulated, much less community oriented and more like tool use tool library kind of style in a lot of ways. And that's not really our bag. We're more about kind of bringing together, weirdos and misfits to hack weird stuff. So if people are just like, Oh, I just want to come and use your tools. I'm like, Man, our tools are not that good. You should go somewhere else if you just want to use tools. But if people want to kind of participate with the whole weirdness of what's happening, man, we're always looking for more folks to come hang out with us. So
do you uh, do you or any of the participants show in any art galleries or do anything more on the artistic side?
Yeah, you know, there's stuff that gets shown in Atlas. There's a couple of people that PhD people and work that we've done, I've shown some stuff with Matt and Lisa, at the Boulder Canyon gallery and festivals. And there's a few people Jeff, Jennifer Herrmann, who works out of the beauty lab, local kind of sound artists and he's done some really amazing installations. And he comes from like a real hard electrical II background circuit design and he went to Stanford to do all that stuff. And now he like makes weird musical instruments that turn environments and spaces into instruments based on like sound and light input from a place so he did a thing in the boulder Public Library returned their whole atrium into this weird percussion instrument with this controller that had light shining in through skylights. And if you blocked the lights and made all these little solenoids all over the room go off in cool patterns. Like there's a lot of people that do neat stuff, and mostly within Boulder, but some people could take it further we have a lab alum, Karina Espinosa, who works out of Denver, and she does these weird like animates really creepy, like baby dolls that she takes apart and then puts electronics inside of them and makes them like move around and weird ways to freak people out in sculpture. She's amazing. So there's, there's a lot I
think I've seen a movie like that before.
Yeah, Chucky? Yeah, no doubt, man. Yeah, there's a group of students that are working on getting stuff into meow Wolf. They're opening a meow wolf branch in Denver. If y'all are familiar with that, and there's a group that have been making this weird set of robotic fish that's swimming around in a big robotic aquarium that's full of baby oil, and then the little like Arduino fish that swim around inside of the tank, which hopefully will be cool. I don't know what the end results gonna look like. But mess. There's all sorts of cool stuff happening here.
Awesome. So you do game design has has even talked to you about the game that we're working on? No. So we're building a text adventure game. And I only have one question is, if there was one thing you could tell someone about game design? What would it be?
Get more people to play your game? Before you say it's done?
There you go. Yeah.
It's so easy to get like hit down with just the people that know your project, the more strangers you can get to come and test your game out, the better it's going to be. And then the other thing that I always tell my students is just kill your babies. Right? You think this thing is so great, and you love it, and then you show it to five people and none of them like it or react to it. Sometimes you just gotta kill your babies. They always freak out. Because I don't ever tell them the last part of that. Right up front. I'm just like, the first thing you should know. Kill your babies. All right, open your books. We don't have babies. Yeah. Because you've killed them all. Yeah, it's really with game design. It's like, you can't hang on to something that's not fun. I have so many students that love their ideas. But they, they purposely don't test it with people because they're like, I tested one person. They didn't like it. And I'm afraid of that rejection. So I'm just going to keep going and work really hard on my game. Maybe if I just work hard by myself for another 25 hours on this. It'll be good. And I'm like, it's still not good. And you're not getting those hours of your life back. So yeah, lots of people to test. And if it's not fun, or if it doesn't meet your goals, it doesn't have to be fun, right? Some games aren't meant to necessarily always be fun, but think about what your big goals are. And if it doesn't meet that, just cut that stuff off was my big game design tips. Hot Tips.
Well, great. Parker, do you have anything you'd like to add to that?
No, actually, thank you for that. I think we have a whole community people that we can ship our game out once we get something working on it.
Yeah, man. Did people love testing games? I was talking to a buddy of mine who's a game designer He works in the community hackerspace in the library here in Boulder, and we're talking about Kickstarter specifically for games. And there's everybody puts everything on Kickstarter, because you know, money is good. But the games community, like the people that are out there, just want to play games, to people that are just like, I'd love to test your game, I want to tell you about your gamma play this game, like people are ready to do that. And that's, there's so many people that are going to like help refine that, although, you know, I kick started this game. And as much as a great feeling as it is to have this successful game and people like it, people play it. And they'll read the comments that people are making on the internet. You're just like, those are some amateur operations is taking too long to ship this. And I'm like, oh, man, because I haven't made a game because the only meal.
But But you did have the number one card game on Kickstarter in 2017. Yeah,
no, we did really well. And it was really good. But I think that, you know, it did well, because so I basically developed it and then sold the game effectively to this to my now business partner, Matt system. And and he worked really hard and got a lot of people involved to like up the production value of the whole thing and get it looking really good and get the Kickstarter looking amazing. Get a really good video and all this. And I think people saw that. And they went, Oh, this must be a big corporation, these guys must have their act together. We're like, no, it's literally just like to doing this, we just made it look really good. And we spent the money to make it happen up front.
That's sort of the story of of like, 1000s of Kickstarters. where that's the story of Oculus? Yeah, oh, yeah, that's true. Oculus was basically they were, they were basically looking to get, you know, bought by, you know, Facebook or at the time at a investment company. And so they spent the extra upfront money and make it look super legit. And basically, they the whole Kickstarter was just for market fit analysis. I know.
And it's just a kind of an amazing world we live in where you can make a product that doesn't exist with a bunch of renderings, and theoretical testimonials. And some venture capitalists will still give you like $1,000 to go to your next round. And like, I don't really know that I like the way that that world works. I'd rather people have to actually show that like patents, right? Like, now you just patent an idea, like I have an idea this phone's gonna fold up and roll up into my pocket. Have you figured that out yet? No, but this idea belongs to us. And then like, I don't think you get to have that idea until you can prove that you actually can do it. Right. You can't just say, Oh, I know that this is a thing that we'll be able to do. Like you have to show up with a working prototype before somebody should give give you intellectual property rights on anything.
Didn't that change, like six years ago, where it was the first person to file the patent gets the patent.
And that's what opened up this entire insanity of like patent wars between companies like basically poaching pieces of IP from one company and then suing each other and then rushing to like purchase a patent on something that they didn't even make it just patent, don't get me started on that stuff. Our whole labs philosophy is very much like default to open, specifically with open source hardware. Partially because Alicia, who I mentioned earlier, is the founder of the open source hardware Association. She's a, she's a big shot with that. So that's a big part of our founding DNA is like, I'm not I'm not like anti patents. But I think there's a lot better ways to do development. I think those laws are outdated and mostly just protect big companies and kind of screw up a little manufacturers and a lot of ways. So I'm pretty I'm pretty anarchistic when it comes to that stuff. All rant all day. And I've already had three beers, so I probably should start that conversation.
So, Danny, do you want to sign us out? Oh, actually, before we do that, okay. Where can people find out more about you and the Atlas Institute and Tam,
man, I love to pitch my website. But I got I got poached by this. You know those companies that have just robots to troll the internet for domains that expire my domain expired and I didn't renew it and then they bought my website and tried to sell back to me for like $2,000. So you can just find out about me on the atlases bt lab.com is a great place to go atlas.colorado.edu. And if you're interested in the game development side of what we do, we actually throw a big festival around experimental games and interactions. Every fall we're going to have the announcement for the next festival. Hopefully that will be up and live. But that's what that i O what.io is kind of our lab website for that. And yeah, be on the lookout for that in the coming days and weeks we'll start pulling applications for weird games. And yeah, that's that's pretty much me. At Danny Rankin on Twitter. I mostly just talk about my food that I'm eating on the on the toilet. I mean, I talk about the food that I'm eating while I'm on the toilet. I don't eat a lot of food on the toilet a little bit. You should
come hang out in our Slack channel sometime. We have a lot of listeners and engineers that are makers and have that sort in there.
I'd love to shoot me an invite. Go.
Well do. And so with that, Danny, do you want to sign us out?
Sure. That was the macro fab engineering podcast and I was your guest, Danny Rankin
and we were your hosts Parker Dolman and Steven Craig later everyone take it easy thank you yes, you our listener for downloading our show. If you have a cool idea project topic or Crazy Engineering idea. Let Stephen and I know Tweet us at macro at Longhorn engineer or at analog EMG or email us at podcast at macro app.com. Also check out our Slack channel. If you're not subscribed to the podcast yet, click that subscribe button. That way you get the latest episode right when it releases and please review us wherever you listen as it helps the show stay visible and helps new listeners find us
Danny Rankin, an instructor at the University of Colorado Boulder, returns to the podcast to discuss education during the COVID-19 pandemic.