No David Here, Chris Gammell with Golioth.io

Parker Dillmann
Hello, listeners. You know, we need to have a name for people who listen to the circuit break podcast, The Breakers. No. I think actually a a sci fi book series uses breakers, so we probably can't use that. Anyways, we have an announcement.

Parker Dillmann
We are finally running a new design contest. It's been forever. We're finally running a new one. It's electric design contest on our community forums. The theme is food devices.

Parker Dillmann
Yes, food. Go to forum.macrofab.com to find out more information about the contest and how to enter for prizes. There's over $5,000 in cash, free prototyping services through Mac Crab, and the most important thing, trophies to show that your design was the best one to be entered into this contest. There'll be a link in the show notes where you can find more information about the contest and how to enter. Seriously, we need to find out a name for people who listen to this podcast.

Parker Dillmann
Welcome to circuit break from MacroFab, a weekly show about all things engineering, DIY projects, manufacturing, industry news, and Goliath and the IoT. We're your hosts, electrical engineers, Parker Dillmann. And Stephen Kraig. This is episode 416. Circuit break from Macrofab.

Stephen Kraig
This week, we're happy to welcome developer relations lead at Goliath, Chris Gammell, to the show.

Chris Gammell
And electrical engineer. Can I say that too? You guys say electrical engineer.

Stephen Kraig
And electrical engineer.

Chris Gammell
Yes. Sorry. Keep going.

Parker Dillmann
Chris focuses on hardware as being an electrical engineer at Goliath, which is a software company, and he tries to imagine the problems that hardware engineers might run into so they can be hardware engineers might run into so they can be addressed before they become problems. Oh, man. I wish that was my job.

Stephen Kraig
Thanks so much for coming on, Chris. How's it going?

Chris Gammell
Good. Good to be back. I think you guys have changed the name of the show since I've been here last.

Parker Dillmann
Yeah. We we changed it from just the back of my

Chris Gammell
MEP is dead. Long live circuit break.

Parker Dillmann
Yeah. Long live circuit break. You might have seen there was, like, a thread in our, in our our circuit break form. That's, we should have named it. What was it?

Parker Dillmann
It's, like, circuit hour or or what was the other one? Amp break?

Chris Gammell
Yeah. Something like that. Yeah. A little pimento. Yeah.

Chris Gammell
Maybe maybe, like, when I'm here, it could be, like, briefly renamed. You know, we gotta stick together. We're Yeah. Podcast pals.

Parker Dillmann
It's actually been a while, Chris, since you've been on the, podcast. I would say Mhmm. You know what? It's interesting. This, like, first couple, months of the year, we've been getting, like, the band back together of, like, guests guests that have not been on the show for a long time.

Stephen Kraig
Yeah. Classic guest.

Chris Gammell
Yes. I've also been doing that on the amp. I think it's just something about, you know, once you get to that level, it's like people have gone off. They've done their interesting stories. They come back.

Chris Gammell
They have new things to talk about. Familiarity, it's always fun to catch up with folks. So yeah. Yeah. I feel you.

Parker Dillmann
So before we dig into Goliath, Chris, can you give us a little background on your engineering and what you what is, like, developer relations lead? That's kind of an interesting title as a, job as well.

Chris Gammell
Yeah. Developer relations is basically what software companies call application engineering. And so I've referred to myself as an application engineer when I talk to hardware crowds, but we're a software company, so it's developer relations. That's fine. We actually now also have a field applications engineer, because that's on someone like so like in my mind, an application engineer is someone who's like developing examples kind of at the factory.

Chris Gammell
Y'all have factory at Macofeb, and developing examples at the factory, and then a field applications person would be then going and helping someone try and use that out in the world, in the field, to deploy that sort of thing. So as the lead, I am the person that's coming up with what ideas and and examples we should work on next. And that takes the form of we do training. We do a lot of training around, Zephyr, which is a real time operating system. We build reference designs.

Chris Gammell
We build hardware using great services like Macrofab, and we basically are the first customer for all of the stuff that our software team is building. Right? So there's like a cloud, there's much cloud engineers, a firmware engineers. They're building things that then they expect some engineer in the world is gonna go use. Well, me and my coworker Mike are kind of those early early testers.

Parker Dillmann
If you were told someone 30 years ago that we would have cloud engineers, you might think there'd be, like, weather, what what a metrop what is it?

Chris Gammell
Meteorology. Neurological?

Parker Dillmann
Yes. That.

Chris Gammell
Yeah. Yep. Yep.

Stephen Kraig
Yeah. So you're primarily doing hardware things at Goliath, Greg?

Chris Gammell
Yes. I am the only hardware person at the company technically, mostly because that's all I know how to do, guys. If they ask me to do cloud service, I don't I don't know what are you what are you even talking about here. But, yeah, I am the hardware person building examples using hardware off the shelf, stuff I've designed, and then does a cloud engineer term make sense? I mean, like, sometimes that is kinda confusing too.

Parker Dillmann
No. No. No. Actually, for me, it makes sense because that's like dealing with cloud based infrastructure is what Sure. Like, AWS and Azure and all those the all the flavors.

Parker Dillmann
Yeah.

Stephen Kraig
Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And How's that different from just software engineer?

Chris Gammell
I think, kind of like a square is a rectangle, but a rectangle is not a square. I think it's like that. So like in group, out group.

Parker Dillmann
More specialized.

Chris Gammell
Yeah, it's more specialized. Usually it's, I think like cloud engineer as well, I mean it usually depends more on the stack of like what the cloud is using, but often they have a lot of capabilities across those things. So for example, at Goliath we use Go on our back end. So all of our cloud folks are Go focused, but then there's also things like Kubernetes and containers and alligators. I don't know.

Chris Gammell
I'm just throwing out words now. The last one was a fake one. I really I thought you would you'd fool me. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell
Right. Cockroach DB is actually a thing. I don't know if you guys knew that. Yeah. And so they kind of go across all of those capabilities, and then you know, tied all together too, right?

Chris Gammell
There's a lot of plumbing involved when you're hooking up databases and front end modules and IP stacks and all all the things that are out there. It's it's really the breadth required is is quite impressive.

Parker Dillmann
I had to look it up, but, yes, CockroachDB is a thing. I was really hoping It is

Chris Gammell
a thing.

Parker Dillmann
I was really hoping their tagline would been something like the database that can't die. Yeah.

Chris Gammell
I don't think they have anything like that. I always remember them because I think it was Defcon, actually. I think they had no. That was something else. Remember that?

Chris Gammell
There was some that had, like, a really big cockroach badge at, badge life at some point at Defcon.

Parker Dillmann
Oh, yeah. Yeah. What was But it

Chris Gammell
it wasn't for it wasn't CockroachDB, I don't think. No. I I I remember at Defcon there was, so it was a while ago.

Stephen Kraig
Okay, so we have a lot of software tech words flying around here. Let's jump back. What is Goliath?

Chris Gammell
Goliath, yes. Okay. So you remember how we said I said like there's a lot of breadth required to like do cloud engineering? Basically, Goliath kind of takes care of all that stuff for you, right? So it basically, all of the things that you might have to do.

Chris Gammell
So I am the hardware engineer. I want to build a product that's IOT based. I want to like make it connect to the internet and send data to various places. Well, I don't personally, I have no idea how to do that, right? I I don't know how to do any of the cloud functions even, you know, I could go maybe go follow some tutorials somewhere, but keeping like a really reliable service up and going and monitoring and like understanding all the thing and scaling it too, right?

Chris Gammell
That's really tough stuff to do. And so that's the Goliath product. Basically, it's a it's a back end, it's a management console, it's different export capabilities out to different services. That's like the Goliath product, but then there's also an entire firmware team that then makes it even easier to connect to that stuff. Right?

Chris Gammell
So Goliath, one of our main ways of connecting is COAP. I don't know if you guys have heard of that before. A lot of people have heard of MQTT, but COAP is the constraint application protocol. It's kind of like a little more lightweight UDP based thing for connecting so basically for sending packets to the Goliath back end. But you don't have to think about any of that stuff because then Goliath also has an open source firmware SDK that allows you to now instead of me as the hardware person having to go and figure out how to write to some cloud service out in the world is now literally an API call in firmware.

Chris Gammell
And so then I just say like light DB write in this, I guess it's just late sorry, it's just stream write. Sorry. It's been a while since I've even looked at the SDK, but it's basically you just call an API within the firmware now at a high level, and you send data to the cloud and all that stuff in between is taken care of for you. So now me as the hardware engineer, right, me as the the solder jockey, the the LED blinker, the the electron junky, I don't know how to do any of that stuff, but all I have to do is do a call within real time operating system in order to send data or get settings updates or do firmware updates over the air.

Parker Dillmann
So I got the big question then, Chris. Yes. So how does Goliath distinguish itself from other companies and infrastructures that are out there that are doing IoT?

Chris Gammell
Well, there's a lot of different ways of doing things. Right? So give me an example, and I'll tell you how we're different.

Parker Dillmann
So so there was one, Steven, a long time ago, you it was your, IoT connected fermentation tilt sensor? Right.

Stephen Kraig
Right. Yeah. It was a tilt sensor that you drop into beer. Eli Hughes' company? Tzero?

Chris Gammell
Or someone else?

Stephen Kraig
No. This was actually an open source kind of

Chris Gammell
Okay. Cool.

Stephen Kraig
Project, but, I don't remember Ubidots. I think it was Ubidots was the name. Ubidots.

Chris Gammell
Sure. Great.

Stephen Kraig
Yeah. Great.

Chris Gammell
So Ubidots is like a visualization platform. Right? And they have an amazing like front end like visualization for that. So they have an app now, they have a website for visualizing stuff, but then they also have an MQTT broker. Right?

Chris Gammell
So basically, that could work. Now if you wanted to have like a like a tilt sensor that's maybe ESP 32 based, you could have it go and talk to the MQTT broker. But the stuff that's a little bit different with Goliath in that case is so we can actually export to Oobadot, but there's basically other things that are layered in there like firmware updates, being able to send settings down to the device then as well. So thinking about like how you would do that and process that. I'm actually not sure of the MQTT capabilities on Ubidots, but I think it's I know there is a broker there, but basically being able to send like I want the tilt sensor to light up when I talk to it.

Chris Gammell
Basically setting doing a setting on the cloud in Goliath. It would then get passed all the way down through all the different layers to the device using, again, the the different one of the differences there is COAP versus MQTT. That's kind of, getting into the weeds of like what is different differentiated there. And then, managing that across all of your devices that might be in the field.

Parker Dillmann
And then another good example would be like Particle.

Chris Gammell
Yeah. So Particle is a great service as well. Like, really, I've done a bunch of projects with them as well. And so Goliath does not have any despite me being the hardware engineer, we actually don't sell any hardware. And so the idea being that so with Particle, you usually need to buy, like, one of their soldered on modules or plug in board, which are really great.

Chris Gammell
But once you wanna move outside of that, so say you wanted to cost down a module or your end end product or there's something that doesn't cover what you need from their hardware offering, you can't go and take the Particle service, the cloud side and actually put that onto any device. And Goliath, I I'll stop before saying any device, but because we, we have so much firmware capabilities across different ecosystems, different software and firmware ecosystems that we can go on many, many, many devices, all of which are custom as well, right? So there's no need to go on to just dev boards. You can go and customize using things like Zephyr, real time operating system or ESP IDF or things like MODIS toolbox. Basically, all of the different target ecosystems that we go for.

Stephen Kraig
Curious if you have any use applications that you can share with us.

Chris Gammell
Sure, sure. There's actually, so I mentioned earlier the, the reference designs, and that is basically kind of the thing I do on a daily basis. So projects.gliet. Io is my kind of my home base for all that stuff. And there's different application spaces targeted on there.

Chris Gammell
So basically it's taking a common platform. All of them are using nRF 9160 from Nordic with a bunch of sensors attached to them and kind of a breakout board that I've initially built. And I could talk about the natural successor to that board, which is what I just built recently with Macroofet. But basically then taking that, plugging in things like click headers, retargeting it at different applications like can based applications or air quality monitoring. Basically being able to show that the flexibility of a platform like that and a platform like Goliath.

Chris Gammell
So the hardware is really kind of it's just it's always the same in in those cases, but it doesn't have to be. Right? It could be retargeted at ESP 32 or, RT 1062 from an XP or different platforms that are out there. But because it's at this high level in a real time operating system, it can retarget for any kind of custom hardware you can dream up and program.

Parker Dillmann
I was looking at that project blog, I guess, you can call it that. But and you call them follow alongs and where it's it's really intuitive in how you go through the entire process of putting everything together and putting and kinda getting this it's been always one of my biggest gripes when you try to get onto one of these platforms. And I think it's because, Chris, you're a hardware engineer and you're speaking the hardware engineering language. And whereas, like, software developers writing how to get onto their platform, they're they speak the software engineering side, and there's always that slight disconnect.

Chris Gammell
Right. Right. Yeah. I'll probably butcher this story, but Jonathan, our founder, used to talk about, basically he had been talking to someone that was doing like certificate based authentication to get a device, you know, verified onto a network. And it was like, it was like the size of of the certificate was so big that it actually wouldn't fit on that microcontroller that they were targeting.

Chris Gammell
And it was because like, well, of course your device is gonna be able to have a certificate just like a web browser does, and it's like, well, these are embedded tiny devices. It's just, it's just like a different set of constraints that you have to be thinking about. And Goliath is embedded first, you know, thinking about thinking about power consumption, thinking about data, throughput, basically things that you're gonna wanna target and put out the world that aren't, you know, Raspberry Pi based or other similar Linux based systems. Low power constrained devices. That's gonna be kind of the the way to think about things.

Chris Gammell
And you need to have not perfect knowledge of of, you know, all the way down to the Electron level or, you know, having a register map in your head of a microcontroller, but having that consideration there is really important, I think. And doing it from a software level where it's like, oh, everything can be everything. You know, that's kinda like where we're gonna get into like layers and layers of abstraction. Everything could be everything. It's just it's just software.

Chris Gammell
It's like, well, it's there's some there's some hardware you gotta you gotta dig into at some point.

Parker Dillmann
So let's back up a tiny bit, and, you were talking about how when you're designing your device and you push it out or I can't remember the exact command you were talking about, but you talked about the the gap between, you know, the cloud and then your device. There's the stuff in the middle that with Goliath, you don't have to worry about, but that stuff in the middle is is really important. We've been talking more recently on this podcast about IoT devices and security.

Chris Gammell
Yeah.

Parker Dillmann
So what does Goliath offer for that kind of consideration?

Chris Gammell
Yeah. On the security side. Well, so you always wanna make sure that your devices are talking over an encrypted channel first off. Right? A lot of devices are like, well, that's just so much overhead.

Chris Gammell
I'm just gonna I'll just send unencrypted traffic and what's the big deal? Who's who's even looking at this traffic? And it's like, it's easier to troubleshoot if I just can throw it on Wireshark. And so you actually can't talk to Goliath Cloud without without being encrypted. So kind of the bare bones day 1 way of doing things is, pre shared keys.

Chris Gammell
So p s k I d, which is your basically like username, and the p s k or pre shared key, which is like your password. And that's kind of just the bare bones. That's what that's what you're gonna start with. That's the only way you can get a device to talk to Goliath, and you can basically, you know Usually, when I plug in a device that's gonna talk to the cloud, I plug in over serial, I type in my credentials, and then off we go, right? It's able to talk once it gets a cellular connection, for example.

Chris Gammell
Past that though then, we use certificate based authentication as well. It's a little bit more there's more to it usually. But once you have a certificate in place, it's kind of the one of the most secure ways you can connect to the cloud because it's basically saying this device not only has gotten on you know, it is verified to get on is allowed to get on network, but then at that time, then you're actually assigning it credentials from that certificate being presented. And that's about all I know about certificates because I'm a hardware person. But it works great.

Parker Dillmann
Yeah. Yeah. One of the the interesting things is What were

Chris Gammell
you guys talking about with security as a reference point?

Parker Dillmann
Oh, the have you heard of Bosch's drill crypt?

Chris Gammell
Oh, was that the that was the the, like, the torque guns that got that got that got hacked. Right? Yeah. Yeah. I I just saw the headline of that, though.

Chris Gammell
Could could you give me a quick recap of what happened?

Parker Dillmann
Yeah. So they were just using, basically, hard coded credentials and just terrible security practices, like like, you could just SQL inject them if you're on the network. That kind of stuff.

Chris Gammell
Got it.

Parker Dillmann
So super actually, really basic things, but it's back to your point where hardware engineers probably did all the design in this firmware.

Chris Gammell
Who's gonna be looking at this? Right? I mean, it's like, yeah. I mean, you should

Parker Dillmann
be just

Chris Gammell
your artist, all that stuff. Right. Exact yeah. Exactly. Right.

Chris Gammell
Right. Exactly. Yeah. I I remember someone was when someone was mentioning it to me, they said, well, why would you even do that in the first place? And there are like some legitimate reasons to have like instantly available torque levels.

Chris Gammell
You know, like if you had like matching of what bit you're about to or sorry, what, bolt you're about to torque in there. But like, you know, it's like convenience versus security type of thing. So

Parker Dillmann
The example I gave in that last episode was, maybe if Boeing knew which which torque setting they were at when they were torquing up their doors. Right. They wouldn't, lost one over.

Stephen Kraig
I can tell you from having done this last year a lot of reliability engineering. Just the aeronautical and aerospace industry requiring so many different requirements and criteria that having a torque wrench that that clicks and sends up to management saying, hey. They actually did what they were supposed to do. That's very valuable.

Chris Gammell
But Sure.

Stephen Kraig
The value completely lost. Security is car Yes.

Chris Gammell
Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

Parker Dillmann
There's actually a really good video, and and this is way off topic because we're here to talk about you, Chris, and Goliath, but, I think there there's a really good video that Bosch has about Triumph motorcycles and Uh-huh. Assembling, basically, engines and how they use that torque wrench to basically verify that everything to that engine was done correctly on the assembly line. So Yeah. Go give that a watch because then you'll be that's like I'm like, that's the use case for it because what Steven just said is, you know, hey, 4 bolts got torqued to this setting, 5 got to this setting, etcetera, and you knew, oh, and it's like, oh, there's one missing. Which one is Right.

Chris Gammell
Yeah. Right.

Parker Dillmann
There's something with, like it can also, like, detect some of them, I think, can detect positioning. So you can you can know which bolts were torqued and stuff like that.

Chris Gammell
So I think one thing to kind of point out from that system though in generally, like, it's like, you know, we're, like, laughing about this. Like, oh, why wouldn't they think of this stuff? Right? But but the thing is like when you're starting a new project, right? Like the 3 of us are probably on the bench troubleshooting or, you know, trying stuff, hacking at stuff, whatever, whatever, whatever.

Chris Gammell
But like these micro decisions at the beginning of a project, they propagate like crazy. Right? Like they basically become architectural decisions, which is insane. Right? I mean, like just thinking about how a tiny little requirement that, like, you know, a former consulting client of mine made an offhanded comment and now that is completely defined the product and all the troubleshooting that we have to do around it.

Chris Gammell
It's like that's just how it works. That's just how that's just engineering in a nutshell. And so one thing I always talk about is like you can use just about any platform to prototype to start with, but like if you pick a good platform like Goliath at the beginning and and take that all the way through, you're going to really benefit from all of the things that we're thinking about. Right? So worth, you know, like we're making it easier for you, but we're also thinking about these things.

Chris Gammell
We're thinking about your production stuff 18 months before you're going to production. And like that's really worth considering because most people don't think about that stuff, and when you when you hit it, it's like a brick wall. You're just running smack into it with you know like no hands, nose to brick. Right? I mean it's just like straight up bloody nose as soon as you get there.

Stephen Kraig
So I I think it's funny because Is that a good sell?

Chris Gammell
I don't know. Too bloody?

Stephen Kraig
I always laugh because every time we we talk to someone about design work or about, you know, some traps to dodge in designing, Yeah. The solution always seems to be, well, just think about this as early as you possibly can and build it into the project, which Yeah. Which is true, but it's also very difficult. Because like you were saying

Chris Gammell
But you don't know what you don't know, right?

Parker Dillmann
You don't

Chris Gammell
I think one of the biggest problems, one of the biggest problem phrases in all of engineering is how hard could it possibly be? Right? I mean like that is something that I have uttered umpteen times and it has bit me every you know every single time and so it's like yes, there is potentially, you know, you might have more to think about upfront if you're choosing a platform like Goliath or using an RTOS like Zephyr, but man, do you get the benefit on the back end. And it's just like you can't know, but once you've gone through it and you have those battle scars, people who have gone through it and and have those battle scars are like, oh yeah, I've been there. Like that that is I need that.

Stephen Kraig
Well, I I like your example of when you're designing something, especially as a hardware engineer, you your head's down at your bench, and you're just trying to get your thing to work. And if my boss came by and was like, hey, have you thought about security on it? I'd look at him like, dude, I'm just trying to get it to work.

Chris Gammell
No need not linking. Right.

Stephen Kraig
Yeah. For sure. So if there's a system that kind of takes care of that for you

Chris Gammell
Yeah.

Stephen Kraig
That's a big thumbs up. Yep. Yep. I'm actually curious. So you're saying you're the hardware guy at Goliath, but Goliath is in effect a hardware company even though the product itself is software.

Stephen Kraig
Right? I mean, it's supporting hardware.

Chris Gammell
Supporting hardware, but it's really no. It is a cloud company. I mean, like, that is yeah. It's weird.

Parker Dillmann
Yeah. It's I mean, it's no more hardware than any other software company that's running on your computer.

Stephen Kraig
Well, I yeah. I get that, but but I guess what I'm saying is the inputs to Goliath come from hardware. They're not necessarily selling the hardware like you mentioned, but it's all tied to hardware at the beginning.

Chris Gammell
Yes. We all are intimately aware of hardware, and we love it. But we're not building it as a product. Right? That's not where the yeah.

Chris Gammell
There's no line item on our p and l.

Parker Dillmann
So this might be beyond what you know about the security side, Chris. So so one of the the big things I've been looking at is individual devices and bringing them up individually with their own key sets. Mean that, like, if one device got compromised, it's only that one device. Compared to, like, if you had one key spread out over many devices, which people might not realize, but, like, back in the day like, when Blu ray got cracked, it was just, like, literally one key.

Chris Gammell
Oh, I did not. Okay.

Parker Dillmann
That was way back in the day. What? Like, o 7 ish? Anyways, so there was, like, they had basically one key was the way to decrypt Blu ray. And so once that key got out in the world, Sony was like, well

Chris Gammell
More yeah. More akin to, like, a physical key where it's, like, everybody's like, oh, I know the shape now, and I'll just unlock with that. Right?

Parker Dillmann
Yeah. Yeah. That's it. So the idea of especially with IoT exploding, reducing what like, if a because this this is the thing with hardware is people have physical access to it. So eventually, they will get in.

Parker Dillmann
It's just that's just how it is. And, go talk to Joe Grand if if if if if you he, you know, he that guy can get into anything. And so Mhmm. So it's reducing your your exposure if a device got compromised. And so one of the ways is is to, know, unique keys and that kind of stuff.

Parker Dillmann
So if one device does get compromised, it doesn't compromise the rest of everything.

Chris Gammell
So you're you're interested in that, but are you asking me how to do that?

Parker Dillmann
No. I was just asking yeah. I'm asking if Goliath supports that kind of provisioning

Chris Gammell
Yeah. That'd be certificates. Right? So basically, it's like you have a like a derived certificate off a root certificate. I'm not I don't know any of this stuff that works under the hood, so I'm just saying some words that I know.

Chris Gammell
But even instead of like the so like for the Blu ray example, right, That would be like if everybody had the same username and password, which also wouldn't really work because you wouldn't have individual records. So it would be hard to replicate like that. But in a certificate based system, basically you have a certificate on the device. It's been derived from a root certificate and then that public key of that root certificate I believe is then put onto Goliath Cloud so you can say, oh, I actually know that this is cryptographically allowed. I'm just saying words now.

Chris Gammell
This doesn't make any sense. Basically, because they're all derived from a commonly known source, that's how you know it's it's supposed to be on the network. And so even if you have one of those certificates, you wouldn't be able to then go and generate a a bunch of others.

Parker Dillmann
So I think all you're missing now, Chris, is for you to say blockchain and AI.

Chris Gammell
No. I don't think

Parker Dillmann
that's possible. And then you got all of them.

Chris Gammell
Although our cloud lead had a good post the other day that said, I accidentally mistyped API as AI, and I just raised a $100,000,000.

Parker Dillmann
That's great.

Stephen Kraig
Actually, totally random off topic. Where did the name Goliath come from?

Chris Gammell
You may notice that in the middle of Goliath, there is IoT. That's why it's spelled different than the biblical Goliath, which has an a. And then, I'm not sure the rest. There's IoT in the middle. That's what I know.

Chris Gammell
I should probably know that. Yes, I should know that.

Stephen Kraig
How long's, Goliath been around for?

Chris Gammell
So it's been around almost 4 years. What year is it? It's 2024. Yeah. It's it's in its 4th year.

Chris Gammell
So, yes, in its 4th year.

Parker Dillmann
So I wanna talk about Lavelle and the Goliath back in.

Chris Gammell
Sure.

Parker Dillmann
So you it's able to monitor, devices in that kind of is there any kind of processing that it's capable of, or how do you get data out of it to process it?

Chris Gammell
Sure. Yeah. So, like, for example, say you had oh, where is it? Here it is. So here's, like, an air quality monitor.

Chris Gammell
This is for Steven Parker, but this is an air quality monitor. Right? This is a nRF, 9160 underneath. It's got HVAC click from Microelectronica, which is basically a CO2 sensor. It's got an air quality monitor sensor.

Chris Gammell
It's got a BME 280, which is temperature, humidity, pressure, all that stuff. And so this thing is basically on a regularly scheduled, you know, basically in a programmable amount of time, in this case 60 seconds. It's basically just piping data up to the cloud saying here's some new readings. I just took some new readings. Then I'm gonna go back to sleep.

Chris Gammell
So that data then gets sent over to LightDB Stream, soon to be just be Goliath Stream, and then it's in the Goliath kind of back end. Right? That's kind of the first thing. So basically it traveled from this device in my hand, which people can't see. It talked to the local cell tower.

Chris Gammell
From the local cell tower, it got routed to the Goliath CoAmp endpoint, and then it's been processed. It's actually been compressed as well, or it's been serialized rather. So then it gets deserialized, kind of expanded a little bit. It's then in plain text on the cloud and you can see it and you can view it in console. Cloud.

Chris Gammell
Io. That's basically our back end end where that's our management console. So if I go and click on the device ID that represents this device, I go in there and I see like at Tuesday January 30th at 9:0:1 pm Eastern. This reading was just sent up to the cloud and here it is and then from within there you can obviously view it, but then there's two ways that you can access and or export that data. 1 is output streams, and basically that's like an ecosystem of different endpoints.

Chris Gammell
So you could send it to an Amazon simple queuing system, SQS, right? So that's basically piping into the AWS ecosystem for your software people to deal with. Same thing with Azure, same thing with Google Cloud. Right? These are different than AWS IoT or Azure IoT because we kind of did all that front end stuff.

Chris Gammell
And so now if it has to go in your data processing back end, whatever, you're basically limitless different places on the cloud it can go from there. That's export. Oh, sorry. That's output streams. What I usually do as a, you know, individual just kind of wanting to visualize this data, is usually I go to Grafana, and then from Grafana, which is like a charting thing in a web.

Stephen Kraig
It's kinda like Ubidots?

Chris Gammell
Yeah, it's kinda like Ubidots. Ubidots is another example as well, right? So Ubidots is actually another output stream that we have, but you can also talk to the Goliath REST API. So say you wanted to just query or even get a a WebSocket from device basically getting notified that, hey, there's a new reading that would be like a WebSocket. That then gets pushed to something like Grafana, and then you just see a new dot on the chart there.

Chris Gammell
And that's something they do very commonly where it's just piping data from a device in the field, and then I send it up to the cloud and then visualize it in different places. Now that's like device to cloud. Right? There's other things like cloud or sorry, bidirectional. Right?

Chris Gammell
That would be like, LightDB state. And that's basically like having a database where both sides can write to it and you can basically say, you know, this value has been updated by device or cloud or device or cloud and go back and forth there. There's also things like cloud to device, so like a setting service. So I said this thing goes every 60 seconds. Well, if I wanted to instead update it and say, you know, send me one every hour.

Chris Gammell
Right? You just send that you set that on the Glat console. You say if I want it to be on a device level, on like a group level or on my entire fleet level. You can go and send that sort of thing. So that's a cloud to device.

Chris Gammell
And then another really really cool cloud to device is something called RPC or remote procedure call. And so that's basically I've wrote I've written a bunch of different functions on, you know, various pieces of hardware, and I just wanna go trigger them. So I'm holding up the thingy 91 right now, which only Steven and Parker can see. But this one has a beeper on it. And I wrote one called play song.

Chris Gammell
And then I can trigger the Mario theme to be played from here right or I could trigger funky town which is a different song I wrote right so basically just having being able to send not only a trigger down the device but then also maybe some characteristics that I want to send with it another really useful one is called get network info which basically says to the device, hey, just send me send me everything you got about your network. And it just sends it that one call, that one remote procedure call. And then everything that it knows about its network, so what tower it's talking to, what its signal level looks like, all of the, you know, basically everything about that then gets piped back to Goliath as well, and that's done on a dynamic basis. It's not like that's not sending it all the time. It's only done as a subroutine when it's told or asked to to send back that data.

Parker Dillmann
So viewers can't see, but that PCB that Chris was just showing off was

Chris Gammell
red. That's right. No longer, though. Because when I recorded with Brendan, he said I should always change the silk screen when I go from Rev A to Rev B. And I was like that is a darn good idea.

Chris Gammell
So I recorded with Brendan Duncombe who is the Macrofabs what's Brendan's title? I don't even know.

Parker Dillmann
Director of Customer Engineering.

Chris Gammell
Okay. There we go. Yeah.

Stephen Kraig
He was on last week.

Parker Dillmann
He's also got a weird title. Yeah.

Chris Gammell
He and I had recorded a video on the Goliath YouTube, which is linkable, viewable, whatever. And, yeah. He he shared that tidbit. I was like, that is a darn good idea. I should be doing that every time.

Chris Gammell
So the next one's white.

Stephen Kraig
We do that, at work. If you see a green PCB, that is going into space. If it's any other color, it does not go into space.

Chris Gammell
Oh, nice. Yeah. That's great. What a great gut check. Makes it easy.

Chris Gammell
Alright. Unless you have color vision issues. I'm actually not sure. The green, I think, is pretty seeable. Maybe I'm wrong about

Stephen Kraig
that. I don't remember exactly what it is.

Chris Gammell
Purples are tough, I think. Yeah. Yeah.

Stephen Kraig
So you've done all the, all the examples, right, for the, the reference designs. Correct?

Chris Gammell
Not just me. No. Well, not just me. But you're talking about, like, on projects.goliath. Io?

Chris Gammell
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I've done those. It's usually me, my coworker Mike Stish, and, Chris Wilson is a contractor of ours.

Chris Gammell
So, like, the 3 of us, and then, oh, also Marco, our FAE. So the kind of the 4 of us are doing a lot of those on a regular basis.

Stephen Kraig
I'm scrolling through them, and these these are fantastic. It's great to just I don't know what to do, read through this, and be able to get to an end result in just one blog post.

Chris Gammell
Yeah. I've referred to them in many different ways, but one of them is like business in a box. Like, in theory, I think you could take something like these designs, which you know it is a box is you know it's a 3 inch by 3 inch by 1 and a half inch tall utility case with flanges on it and like in theory, you could deploy it in the field and make a business out of it, right? It's basically if you just want to be like a company that is deploying hardware but really selling data, which is a lot of IOT companies in my experience, I think you're 80% there. Right?

Chris Gammell
That's another thing I have to talk about is like an 80% done design. You need to productize it. You probably need to, you know, harden it for different environments and stuff like that, but the code's done. Right? You have visualization.

Chris Gammell
You have all the cloud back end stuff. This is stuff that people, you know, they think that that's the easy part, but then that becomes its own 18 month project. Right? And then you have to productize the actual data piece. So if, like, if you actually want to sell make an IoT business, that's where it starts to make sense.

Parker Dillmann
You're basically doing the MVP for a lot of people.

Chris Gammell
That's right. Yeah. That's a good way to say it. Yeah. It's not the best hardware.

Parker Dillmann
It's not

Chris Gammell
the smallest hardware. Right? But like but it's like 80% there. Right? And and like and then you you take something like this which has all the ideas in it.

Chris Gammell
You tweak out your sensors. You know, you figure out if the base processor is what you need, if it's cost optimized, however you need to be. But then because it's in Zephyr as well, the real time operating system, it's very that part is abstracted to the hardware. You retarget at the new hardware, and you have kind of the same business logic in there, and then you just start pumping data to the cloud. Right?

Chris Gammell
And that's really what a lot of companies wanna do.

Parker Dillmann
Yeah. I I was gonna bring up Zephyr as terms of, you know, because Glath runs on Zephyr, which basically allows you to

Chris Gammell
Not just Zephyr.

Parker Dillmann
Well, yeah, not just Zephyr, but Zephyr Yeah. Is targeted on a lot of different platforms out there. And, I've actually have experience using Zephyr in really interesting environments like Defcon.

Chris Gammell
Yeah. So Oh, nice.

Parker Dillmann
Yeah. It it does work really well, but it's one of those it's interesting what you brought up earlier. The whole, like, you know, your hardware engineer and your you got your head down. Like, thinking about a real time operating system is probably like the least thing you want to deal with at that point. Yeah.

Parker Dillmann
But Zephyr really helped.

Chris Gammell
Increasingly, like yeah. I mean, so I'm guessing you were probably, like, on a Nordic Bluetooth part probably with the Correct.

Parker Dillmann
Yeah. I was actually Nordics

Chris Gammell
are folks. Right?

Parker Dillmann
Yep.

Chris Gammell
Yeah. Yeah. And you don't have a choice. Right? I mean it's like Nordic is Zephyr first.

Chris Gammell
That's your I mean that is bringing a ton of people to the ecosystem. There's a lot of complaining about it until they dig in and they're like wow. Oh my gosh, all these things you get from it. So we just published a blog post today, which I know it sounds like kind of silly, but Chris, our contractor is also working on reference designs. He wrote about this.

Chris Gammell
We're on this board, sorry the board that I've been holding up to Stephen and Parker, basically we have some regulators on there that are need to be on by default. And so in Zephyr, he wrote a blog post about how you do that before any of your code executes. So you just go and turn on all this hardware before anything processes because it needs to be on first, and that's like a Zephyr feature. But then the real thing is at the bottom of the post, he talks about the shell. And so like basically every subsystem in Zephyr, be it ADCs or sensors more broadly or I squared c or spy or all these different things that are in there, they all have shells And then you can go, you know, basically you connect it over serial, and then you can enable a shell like this power, what's called regulator shell, and then you can go and just toggle stuff on and off.

Chris Gammell
And when I think about like my work as a hardware engineer bringing this stuff up, yeah, you do have to like have the hardware interface layer, right? So like what's called device tree and Zephyr. Once you have that, then you have these testing tools all throughout. So like just doing I squared C scans and you know seeing what's connected and you know if you were using the I squared C shell or in the case of this one toggling power regulators on and off and just being able to tweak that stuff. Instead of having some external tool, you know, I would have like maybe done it in Arduino in the past to toggle the to scan the I squared c bus.

Chris Gammell
Now I'm just, it's just built right in, and it's a tool that's ready to go. It's killer.

Parker Dillmann
Yeah. It it's my experience with it is a lot like a couple years ago, Microchip and Atmel and, Silicon Labs and stuff. They kept coming up with these different, like, architectures that you would, like, bigger, chunkier libraries that you would run on your microcontroller to help you out with this kind of stuff.

Chris Gammell
Helliest of all hells. Yeah.

Parker Dillmann
I can't remember what the what the the mic I think that was the microchip one. Mhmm. Can't remember what it's called. Anyways, but Zephyr kinda does it a better way in its cross platform. But it's one of those as a hardware engineer, you kinda just want to, like, if you're not used to this kind of stuff, you you like, I just wanna write on bare like, I wanna write c and make it compile

Chris Gammell
all the c. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah.

Parker Dillmann
I like it's gonna hit. But you're

Chris Gammell
not value into a register. Yeah. That's exactly right. But you can do that in Zephyr.

Stephen Kraig
I wanna touch every bit.

Chris Gammell
Yeah. Right. You could do that. Yeah.

Parker Dillmann
No. You can totally do it in Zephyr.

Chris Gammell
Yeah. And you do need to dive down to levels of abstraction sometimes, but like, but then the problem is when you're at that, like that bit twiddling level to start with, and then you need to go talk to the internet and you need like an IP stack is like, oh, now I gotta build it up from the bottom. So it's basically like you're starting from like very, very top down in Zephyr and yes, you can dive all the way bottom if you want to. There are some struggles there, but then when you were like if if things are working to start with. So say you're starting from a reference design platform like Goliath has or even just like a development kit, like the the d k boards from Nordic, once you're starting from that point, you can do so much so fast.

Chris Gammell
It's really nuts.

Parker Dillmann
Yeah. I just remember when the biker chip one came out, and it would just would break everything. And you're like and you basically you had to it basically was like you just had to go dig into and find the right registers and be, like, okay.

Chris Gammell
Yeah.

Parker Dillmann
Copy paste this into the top level, and then it would start working. And, my the experience I had with Zephyr was completely 180 of that. Yeah. But I came into it with the wrong mentality, though. I was like, oh, this is gonna suck just like this other experience.

Chris Gammell
Yeah.

Parker Dillmann
And then it ended up being like, oh, it actually isn't it wasn't the worst thing. It actually worked really well.

Chris Gammell
Yeah. So Goliath does regular trainings, for Zephyr and you know how how to use it with Goliath. Goliath. Iotraining signup. That's like our regular thing.

Chris Gammell
We got one coming up in February. That's February 20 something. But basically all you have to do is buy NordicDK and then you don't even have to install a toolchain. This is like absolute magic to me. So it's happening February 21st of this, 24.

Chris Gammell
And yeah, so basically you have a development kit. You are using Codespaces. So basically you click a link. Everything is pre installed in a container in the cloud and then it just shows up like Versus code in your browser And then you compile from there and download it. It's literally magic to me.

Chris Gammell
I mean, like, it's unreal what's, what's possible there. Because like Zephyr's, as much as I love it, it's it is a horrendous beast to install the first time. I I had a lot of trouble, and now it's like you don't have to deal with it. So

Parker Dillmann
That's kinda interesting. They they put that whole experience into the cloud.

Chris Gammell
Yeah. And, actually, you can see that. Even if you don't wanna come to training, you can just go to training.goliath. Io, and that is all detailed there so you can actually just go and click in and like it's like 30 seconds to be like from like booting up a container. You need a GitHub account.

Chris Gammell
Sorry. But then it boots up a container and then you're just ready to compile and then you could follow along with the tutorial. So it's really quite impressive. That's all my my teammates it's not me. And our CEO, Jonathan, he did all the container stuff.

Parker Dillmann
So, you mentioned that you were, you had a video with, Brendan. Mhmm. So what was that whole talk about?

Chris Gammell
Oh, it's been so long, Parker. That was about, you know basically taking hardware to production right so we were talking about microfab services of course and this board that I've been working on. But then just kind of like best practices for not just designing the board, but then thinking about like past that. So like, Brendan's talking about things like testing once your board's kind of through through production, programming, end of line type stuff as well. That's what I can remember right now.

Chris Gammell
Should I pull that up? No worries.

Stephen Kraig
I've met Brendan once, and I could tell he's really into testing.

Chris Gammell
Yeah. Yeah. He definitely the number of time he said to put more test points on your board is I think it was in the double digits.

Parker Dillmann
It's kinda interesting because, Brandon goes both ways. So, on that test point thing is when you're spinning up for the first time and doing your first initial runs, yes, all the test points. But it's like Yeah. If you're in production, take them all off.

Chris Gammell
Yeah. Right. Right. Right. Yeah.

Parker Dillmann
Because Brendan had a, webinar today to talk about physical security and PCBs.

Chris Gammell
Yes. That's the thing. I mean, if you have, like, 4 test points, then you're, like, these are the SWD pins. Come on in. Exactly.

Chris Gammell
Yeah. But the thing is that it's not really gonna slow people down too much if they have access to your device. Yeah.

Parker Dillmann
That's what I was talking about earlier.

Chris Gammell
But here's the thing like so this is something I talked to, Josh. Anyways, one of the guys in the security community. He's like, you know, you could always pipe something like a light sensor to your device, you know, and have, like, have connectivity or have like sensing capabilities to know when your case has been breached, things like that. So there's a lot of interesting things you can do there. It's really with just understanding how you expect your your users and your attackers are going to interact with your hardware.

Chris Gammell
Mhmm.

Parker Dillmann
So on Goliath, so what's in the future then? What's the next project that you're gonna do a follow along on?

Chris Gammell
Yeah. So follow along I guess I didn't explain what follow along hardware is. So I'm holding up a custom piece of hardware that y'all can't buy. I guess Parker could go and pluck it out of the the production line right now, but please don't. I'm supposed to be in my house soon.

Chris Gammell
And You

Parker Dillmann
just gave me permission. I'll drive on over there right now.

Chris Gammell
Right. They let me do whatever I want. Yeah. So that is a piece of custom hardware that I've been working on and, producing through Macrofab, but it you can't buy it. Right?

Chris Gammell
So if I'm showing an example of that, it's got this case, it's got like a custom, front panel board and stuff like that. That's not that useful. But because it's Zephyr and because you can retarget other hardware basically we say here are the parts you can literally go buy off the shelf right now. So nRF 9160dk, Arduino to UNO to click board because all these dev boards still have Arduino headers on them, fine, but then there's an interface board to, mic electronic click, then there are a bunch of click headers that we implement there. We designed from the beginning having off the shelf hardware.

Chris Gammell
So then it's basically there's a configuration file that changes between the custom Aludel board that I've designed and my team and I work on, and then this off the shelf hardware, and then you can just go and retarget it. And it's that's really important to us because, like you said, if you're trying to figure out an IoT project or if you already know one, right, you've found that you, yes, you need an air quality monitor. You wanna show your boss something working like a day or 2 from now. Like, that's amazing to be able to do that without soldering wires everywhere or whatever. It's basically just taking this idea and then implementing it and showing the data, which is ultimately the product.

Chris Gammell
That's one thing that I've come to accept unfortunately is IoT companies, the data is the product as much as I want the hardware to be the product. And so how do you get to that that product as fast as possible?

Parker Dillmann
Yeah. All it would take is the company credit card going to Mouser and Yeah. And following along on the, Goliath blog for that.

Chris Gammell
Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.

Parker Dillmann
So interestingly, what was the name of the board?

Chris Gammell
The aluedo?

Parker Dillmann
Yes. What what is that?

Chris Gammell
Aluedo is a platform.

Parker Dillmann
Okay.

Chris Gammell
It is a medieval alchemical container. So basically it was like a, you know, alchemy was like a bunch of horse hockey, but you know. So it was like all silliness, but I love like how they had names for all these different vessels and things like that. And so I knew I was working on a case that was going to contain magic. And so I was like, oh, yes.

Chris Gammell
Alchemy. And then the newest board is called the so the AudioDell is kind of the platform, and then the Elixir is the new board. Gotcha. So a lot of thematic, alchemy things. Also, I don't know if you remember this.

Chris Gammell
You remember the game alchemy? It was like a flash game and it's been like, do you remember that game? Alchemy? Not really a male. Most addictive game.

Chris Gammell
It's like you start with, like, 4 or 5 elements on like the side of the screen, and then you like drag them into this play space, and then you start dragging them on top of each other. And then so it's like fire plus water equals steam. Right? Now you have a new element to play with, and steam plus dirt equals, I don't know, like lava. And, you know, some of them were kind of like mental leaps.

Chris Gammell
It is such an addictive game. And it was like, I remembered it from like, I think it was like my college days when I first came out, and then I was searching for these things and I found it when I was looking for the names, and I was like oh no.

Stephen Kraig
That was Is it what the

Parker Dillmann
is it the one with the triangles?

Chris Gammell
The triangles.

Parker Dillmann
This must not be it.

Chris Gammell
I don't know. Alchemy game? Let's see.

Parker Dillmann
Alchemy flash game. I got,

Chris Gammell
littlealchemy.com. I think that's the one.

Parker Dillmann
Like Okay. Yeah. This is more in line with what you're talking about.

Chris Gammell
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's so much fun. It's so addictive.

Chris Gammell
Be very careful. If I'm just talking and and Parker and Steven are are not talking to us, this the episode is because they've

Parker Dillmann
they Apparently,

Chris Gammell
the little they got looped in.

Parker Dillmann
2 is out. Mhmm.

Chris Gammell
There you go. More combinations.

Parker Dillmann
But I gotta close that I gotta close that window. Yeah. Yeah. No. I'm telling you.

Chris Gammell
It's super addictive.

Parker Dillmann
Yeah. I started seeing the meter go up, and I'm like, oh, yeah. Yeah.

Stephen Kraig
Yeah. The dopamine is just squirting.

Chris Gammell
Exactly. Off the charts. Yep. Oh, man. Yeah.

Chris Gammell
So, what's next with that stuff? So this platform has been closed so far. Right? It's basically just been things that I've been working on and things we take to trade shows and stuff like that. Assuming Rev B works, which would be my fault, if it does not.

Chris Gammell
But assuming it works we're gonna actually be open sourcing that design and making that available. There's also a front panel for the case so we have like a off the shelf case from BudBoxes that we buy. It's like a little it's called a utility case or something like that. I basically carve out the back, so I have like 3 d printed kind of swappable plates in there and then they're, sorry 3 d printed swappable walls effectively of this case and then, the front panel and instead of a plastic front panel that comes with it I made a PCB front panel that, is actually an I squared c, peripheral device. And so from Zephyr or ESP IDF and all the different platforms out there, basically you just send like an I squared c message that says, hey, my temperature reading is 24 and then it shows up in e paper screen.

Chris Gammell
So it's it's all e paper and nice and pretty and yeah. It's it's great. So that's nice for trade shows.

Parker Dillmann
Yeah. I guess I can go the opposite way. You can have, like, CapSense buttons and that kind of stuff.

Chris Gammell
The it also has that. Yes.

Parker Dillmann
Oh, I of course.

Chris Gammell
Of course.

Parker Dillmann
So I have to ask because of the name Goliath too.

Chris Gammell
No. Don't do this. What's

Parker Dillmann
the potential, David?

Chris Gammell
You mean, like, what is our downfall? What is our weakness? Or what could be? This question, Parker.

Parker Dillmann
With a name like Goliath, you have to ask that.

Chris Gammell
Yeah. I mean, I had I had the same thought when I joined the company. I'm like, oh, that's gonna be a headline someday.

Stephen Kraig
Oh, no. You're gonna be asked this on a podcast one day.

Chris Gammell
Yeah. I mean,

Stephen Kraig
I think

Chris Gammell
the hardest thing for any of this stuff is just the complex any IoT system is just the layers of complexity. Right? So like to go from So like say a thermistor which is like you probably are not using that on a lot of designs but it's it's a it's basically a thermistor is just like a 10 k resistor usually and then you tell what the resistance difference is, right? To go from that all the way to like saying what the temperature is that the thermistor is representing like on the cloud there are so many steps in between and like when I think about the amount of like cognitive and technological excess that I I bask in every single day it is kind of mind boggling. Right?

Chris Gammell
Like I'm using a cellular modem to transmit that temperature all the way up to the cloud in order to pass it over somewhere else and it's like, oh, my bread is done or something like that. Right? The the triviality that it enables. The problem is, there are lots of layers of complexity in there and if people are you know if you don't use a thing like Goliath, I think one of the complexities is that you then have to go and implement all that stuff yourself. I think one of the problematic things for Goliath at the beginning is that like Zephyr is non trivial to learn.

Chris Gammell
We help people learn it. We want people to learn it. We think, you know, and other ecosystems that we support as well. We are here to educate and help people, but like sometimes it's frustrating to the point where I'm sure that some people somewhere on the internet are looking at our stuff and they throw up their hands and say this isn't for me. And I want to help get them through it, but like that is a big risk because it's it is different than tweaking register values.

Chris Gammell
Right? But the things that you get along the way, the the treasures that you get in the alchemical world, because I know you guys are still playing. No I'm just kidding. Yeah. The things that you get along the way are really worth it I think.

Chris Gammell
And so some of it is like just trust me bro. But, some of it is also like I was just I think it's people who have the experience of of having tried to go and build all that stuff themselves they will see the things that are beneficial from it. Did I answer your question?

Parker Dillmann
Oh, yeah.

Chris Gammell
Everybody just doesn't say David in there. No. The answer is David Jones. That's the downfall. No.

Stephen Kraig
No. Actually, I I think I think you hit it on the head. I think in many ways, you are the solution to that situation, and I say that just because I have experienced companies like this where they just say, hey, we've got this magical project and here's our API documentation. Good luck. Have fun.

Stephen Kraig
And there's some third party guy who's like, guys, I cracked the code, follow my instructions on how to get this done. And and being able to connect the dots, which in so many ways is what you are doing there, I think is the key to showing people how this actually works.

Chris Gammell
Yeah. Agree. No. I agree. I was actually kinda surprised when I started the company I was actually a contractor to start with but when I started I remember there was like I was like following along I think it was like a read me or something like that.

Chris Gammell
It was like someone's project read me because they were doing stuff and then they're like well you read the docs right? I'm like oh right there's a doc site like and like but for software developers, like, that is the first thing they click. They just go straight there. I'm like, datasheet? I'll go I'll run towards a datasheet, right?

Chris Gammell
I will run towards a step by step guide, and so some of it is kind of the context that people come into, you know, like what their expectations are, but it's kind of an all of the it has to be an all of the above. It has to be a forum. It has to be a step by step guide. It has to be docs. It has to be videos on YouTube.

Chris Gammell
Right? I mean, like, that's a modern thing that I do. It's just like modern thing. You know, YouTube, it's so modern, guys. Is it modern?

Chris Gammell
I'm like

Stephen Kraig
Well, as always, you know, we approach it from a hardware perspective.

Chris Gammell
Yeah. Right. Right.

Parker Dillmann
Now you're gonna tell me that Glide has an IRC channel that we have to go walk

Chris Gammell
into. Yeah. Yeah.

Stephen Kraig
Reach out to them on AIM.

Chris Gammell
Yes. Right.

Stephen Kraig
Is AIM still around?

Chris Gammell
I'm sure it is.

Stephen Kraig
It's gotta be. Yeah.

Chris Gammell
American Online is still, making, I think, 1,000,000,000 of dollars still.

Stephen Kraig
Oh, wow. Yeah. Still sending out CDs. Not for

Chris Gammell
me, thanks. None for

Parker Dillmann
me. They'll say still sending out CDs to everyone.

Chris Gammell
Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

Parker Dillmann
So, before we wrap up, Chris, where can where do people need to go? We mentioned Goliath in a lot of different websites, but where where should people go first?

Chris Gammell
I mean, if you wanna see kinda what it is, what we do, whatever, I would say goliath dot I o. So it's g o l I o t h dot io. And that's, you know, just gonna show you a rundown of all the what the product is and kind of different industries to target about it, stuff like that. I would say our YouTube channel which you could find from there as well if you want to just kind of see stuff in action. Personally I I usually go there first because I just want to just show me.

Chris Gammell
Don't tell me. Don't you know send me docs or whatever. Just show me it working. I want to see it working once. And that's on our youtube channel.

Chris Gammell
Then our blog, blog.goliath. Io. There are a lot of properties here I'm gonna list off. The project site that we've been talking about here, so that's follow along hardware and reference designs, that's projects.goliath. Io.

Chris Gammell
And training, it's training.goliath. Io. That's where you can go and actually open up a a browser and get into Versus Code and try it out without having to have I guess you don't even need the hardware, but you should have the hardware because blinking blinking LEDs. It's like dopamine shots to my eyeballs, you know.

Parker Dillmann
What if you open that up and there was a stream of 1, like, sitting on your desk, Chris, and people can make that LED blink in that Versus Code. And then you can have server racks of those.

Chris Gammell
You wouldn't have the PSK and PSKID because we're so secure. So bingo.

Parker Dillmann
Good point.

Chris Gammell
Thwarted, Parker. Yeah. Find me on LinkedIn, on Mastodon. I don't know. Lots of different places.

Chris Gammell
So Thank

Parker Dillmann
you so much, Chris, for showing up on our podcast after I mean, I wanna say 6 years.

Chris Gammell
Hundreds of episodes.

Parker Dillmann
It's it must have been 6 years. The last time you were on the podcast, I thought you were on vacation somewhere in, like, the middle of nowhere.

Chris Gammell
Does that sound like me?

Parker Dillmann
Or just came

Chris Gammell
back. Yeah. That okay. Maybe that. Yeah.

Chris Gammell
Okay. I don't remember, but it's been so long that it could have been. You know? Yeah. Yeah.

Stephen Kraig
Well, thank you so much. Thanks for having me.

Chris Gammell
Yeah. Thanks for having me back. I appreciate it.

Parker Dillmann
So for those interested in learning more about Chris and Goliath, please visit goliath dot I o. That is golioth.i0. And there also will be links in our show notes. Thank you everyone for listening to Circuit Break. We are your hosts, Parker Doleman.

Stephen Kraig
And Steven Craig.

Parker Dillmann
And thank you so much, Chris Gammel. My pleasure. Thank you. Yes. You are listener for downloading our podcast.

Parker Dillmann
Tell your friends and coworkers about the circuit break podcast. If you have a cool idea, project, or topic you want to discuss, let Steven and I and the community know. Our community, where you can find personal projects, discussions about the podcast, engineering topics, and news, is located atform.macafab.com. Finally got that little shortener for y'all.