Parker and Stephen gear up for DefCon 27 and discuss how custom transformers can change design philosophy.
Parker talks with Brandon Satrom of Particle about the future of IoT and then design and prototype an IoT device.
Slow/soft Start devices and circuits, Shark Fin sound effects, and Belt Buckle Badge Designs.
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Figure 1: John Adams in his lab with his Ides of DefCon Badge.
Figure 2: Ides of DefCon prototype badge.
Figure 3: Parker and Stephens temporary podcast recording setup.
Parker is an Electrical Engineer with backgrounds in Embedded System Design and Digital Signal Processing. He got his start in 2005 by hacking Nintendo consoles into portable gaming units. The following year he designed and produced an Atari 2600 video mod to allow the Atari to display a crisp, RF fuzz free picture on newer TVs. Over a thousand Atari video mods where produced by Parker from 2006 to 2011 and the mod is still made by other enthusiasts in the Atari community.
In 2006, Parker enrolled at The University of Texas at Austin as a Petroleum Engineer. After realizing electronics was his passion he switched majors in 2007 to Electrical and Computer Engineering. Following his previous background in making the Atari 2600 video mod, Parker decided to take more board layout classes and circuit design classes. Other areas of study include robotics, microcontroller theory and design, FPGA development with VHDL and Verilog, and image and signal processing with DSPs. In 2010, Parker won a Ti sponsored Launchpad programming and design contest that was held by the IEEE CS chapter at the University. Parker graduated with a BS in Electrical and Computer Engineering in the Spring of 2012.
In the Summer of 2012, Parker was hired on as an Electrical Engineer at Dynamic Perception to design and prototype new electronic products. Here, Parker learned about full product development cycles and honed his board layout skills. Seeing the difficulties in managing operations and FCC/CE compliance testing, Parker thought there had to be a better way for small electronic companies to get their product out in customer's hands.
Parker also runs the blog, longhornengineer.com, where he posts his personal projects, technical guides, and appnotes about board layout design and components.
Stephen Kraig began his electronics career by building musical oriented circuits in 2003. Stephen is an avid guitar player and, in his down time, manufactures audio electronics including guitar amplifiers, pedals, and pro audio gear. Stephen graduated with a BS in Electrical Engineering from Texas A&M University.
Special thanks to whixr over at Tymkrs for the intro and outro!
Welcome to the macro fab engineering podcast. I'm your guest, John Adams.
And we are your hosts Parker Dolan
and Steven Craig, and this is episode 83.
Before we dive into this episode, I would like to thank everyone that emailed us here at macro fab with your concerns over our safety as we faced hurricane Harvey. We are happy and grateful to report that all our team members are safe and macro fat is safe and dry. We survived. Yeah, barely. And we're doing a podcast.
That's right. Harvey is not going to prevent us from doing it. But guess. Yeah. So it was pretty crazy. Yeah, yeah. Got a lot of rain.
Oh, my God.
So this week, our guest is John Adams. John Adams is a security researcher, investor and technologist from San Francisco. John was a previous early employee at Twitter, and is a one man entertainment machine.
He lives up to that last one. Um, so this episode's gonna be kind of weird for a guest. Because we actually have like a umbrella topic of IoT security. We normally talk about like in the news where like, you know, IoT devices get hacked, and stuff like that, but and everyone's like, oh, we need more security. But then there's like, what do you do to increase more security on your IoT devices? No one really talks about that. So John? Yes. What What? What should we do?
Well, I think help us hardware games?
Well, I think the biggest problem is, is not really the hardware, I think, I think for the most part, the hardware takes care of itself. But the real problem is, is the software and you know, for the most part, Internet of Things is mostly Internet of very insecure Linux boxes that no one updates. And this is, and this is always a concern, it's that we have literally millions of devices out there. And these these devices are distributed by manufacturers. And the manufacturers don't put any sort of, you know, decent quality updating system on these devices. And then what happens is we we end up with the Internet of Things becoming a massive botnet that people use to attack other systems, or our installed Dumon. Right, or, and so on, right. And we saw this recently with what was at the, I can't remember the exact manufacturer, but the the cameras, where everyone was able to use the cameras as a massive botnet, to create a distributed denial of service attack against other devices. So and for the most part, it's, it's trying to give these these hardware manufacturers guidance on what happens when you deploy software. How do you deploy the software in such a way that you can do remote updates? And how do you make sure that the consumers are actually taking updates? Because, you know, let's face it, even though the hardware might stay stagnant, or the firmware is stagnant? There is still vulnerability has been discovered in Linux every day.
Mm hmm. Like, what was the
end? You know, it's not just Linux. I don't want to single out Linux. Yeah. It was
like the SSH. Was that two years ago? Yeah.
Yeah, there was a there was a remote code execution exploit in, in SSH.
Yeah, that was there for almost eternity, basically. And it just like that, I think, the catching that code review or something like that?
Yeah. Well, it's been a while.
Well, yeah, I, you know, I think, you know, what was it in? In 2016, there was a massive attack against against dine. What's that? Sorry, that's my computer. Um, so there were people attacking. There was like a, like a Chinese DVR that had a password of root root. And that was, and that was, so that, that was the basis for them, or I bought net, if you remember that. So people were people were logging into cameras, and using using this default root password. And then using that to attack other devices on the Internet. In fact, they ended up attacking Dyne, which was a major DNS provider. And, you know, it was a, there was a big there's a big failure across Twitter, and Amazon AWS in in 2016, because because of a default password issue, so I think I think a lot of this comes down to there's more Unix machines being put on the internet. And there there's more servers that are you know, it's not just a camera, you're actually putting a full computer on the internet and that computer can be used to attack other computers. That's that's the basis of this problem.
Yeah, it's like the explosion of like, let's say the Raspberry Pi for doing projects and stuff. Oh, yeah. Yeah, cuz like you will put a, you know, instead of doing an Arduino with a Wi Fi module that's got very limited functionality of what the firmware can do, right? Read an analog input, and then transmit that, you know, that package over the Wi Fi. Now you got a full fledge computer there. And for every code no matter what,
right, and for every Raspberry Pi that exists on the internet, the default user is pi and the password is raspberry. Yeah. It's like, Please change your password. I think, um, I think we're sort of seeing like, it's, it's almost like what happened when, when the early Wi Fi routers came out? You know, the, the first the first kind of big push of everyone having a computer in their house was this, you know, very limited use Wi Fi router. And I think that they they sort of deployed initially with the Wi Fi network being open and with a password probably being something like Linksys you know,
yeah, yeah. And, or no password at all, or no password
ran into one the other
day they were the password was password. Yeah. Oh, lovely.
Um, but you know, I think what happened in time is that you started seeing even on like, the Apple Airport, and you know, other devices, as more and more wireless devices came came into use, we started seeing things like, Oh, you can only connect to the admin interface from the local network. Oh, you know, the, the internet admin option is not available. Even the default password is generated when the system turns on. Or in the case of like, you know, some of our local ISPs like Sonic and things like that, you know, they, they printed the password on the side of the modem, which isn't exactly secure, but you have to get to the person's house to get the password. So because it's like a random series of 20 digits. Yeah. So there are, there are ways of doing this that are that are more secure. And I think for people that are developing devices that have internet connectivity, that there's better ways of solving this problem.
Yeah, one thing devices start doing too is basically when you turn it on, it goes, this is the default, and it makes you change things password, which is okay. Except most users use, like, what's the top 20 most common passwords? And most of them are one of those now, yeah, you're
like, God 121236. And
I actually like the idea of basically, you know, the random password that's kind of, you know, maybe not printed on it, but it goes, here's a random generated password. Right? That's it. Right, exactly.
Um, you know, it's funny, because like, we've, we've looked at, you know, normally when we talk about security, we look at the threat model, we say, What's, how are people going going to attack the device? And I think that like, sometimes a lot of emphasis is given to things like firmware signing and, and malicious updates, but that's really not. That's not much of a problem considering that most people leave the device unlocked.
Yeah, to begin with, yeah. Yeah, cuz it's, it's one of those where if a person has physical access to the device, there's not much you can do. Like we've seen people basically take ROM chips out of iPhones. Oh, yeah. And get the data from the wrong chip. So it's like, you can't stop someone if they want the data. But hardware
hacking is incredibly difficult for average people. No, yeah. I
mean, I mean, most people don't have a microscope. Most people don't have a, you know, hot air station.
I mean, the knowledge on what to do with it, right. So yeah, there's a guy, we how do we get around all of this?
Which part? Which part? How do how do we hack? Or how do we how do we defend it?
Sounds like the biggest, you know, issue with security with IoT is just making sure default passwords, aren't there. Yeah, there's,
you know, there's, um, there's something that I've talked about a lot in, in talks I've given at security conferences, which is how strong defaults are. So, you know, in this occur is like, if you look at Twitter, if you look at Facebook, there are privacy and security defaults that happen, you know, when you set up your account, and same thing when you set up an IoT device, like, if the device defaults to being open, then guess what, it's probably going to stay open, you know, yeah, if it defaults to having a shitty password, it's probably going to have a crap password. And I think a lot of this is like when you design this is sort of like the interface between design engineering and, and the consumer, which is like, if you're building these devices, you need to understand how the defaults work, and to make sure that the defaults are, are secure. So you know, I guess, I guess what I'm saying is like when you build a device, like make sure it's secure by default, not open by default. And that's, that's a big deal.
Yeah, even if it causes just, you know, a slight amount of user friction, yeah. At that point, though, they've already bought your device. Right? So you already got the money?
Well, it's, it's also the thing, right? You know, there's, there's a very famous triangle, which I bring up all the time, which is, you know, you have security, convenience and cost, right. So, if you make the device really convenient, it's probably not secure. If you make the device really cheap. It's probably not secure. You want you want the sweet spot in the middle. And, you know, my friend always says, It's like dating. It's like smart, pretty sane. Pick two. And it doesn't matter if it's male or female, you know, it's always a problem.
So yeah, um, and I was actually looking at your Twitter feed earlier. Yeah. retweeted something from Internet of shit, which was one of my favorite Twitter feeds as well. Basically a Twitter feed. That's just basically reposts all the IoT crap that Oh, yeah. All the time. Yeah. Yeah. You
know, even toilet toilet paper should not have an IP address, you know, things like Yeah.
But it was a, it was an article where, because we're talking about updates, and so I'm like, you know, should you force users to have that update? Because most time, that's good. But there was that? I can't remember what the devices were basically bricked, it was a smart door lock. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And it basically every user or not overuse it. But a lot of users got locked out of their house because they couldn't it basically brick their their lock.
Yeah. That was the
friction. Yeah. Friction.
That was a I believe that was the the lock eyes state or lock a state remote lock. And we actually have a theater that I, I do some workout when I'm, you know, doing the entertainment thing. And they couldn't get into the theater because the lock had bricked itself. And, you know, it's, it's, it's amazing. It's like, the problem. The problem with remote updates is is, you know, you can do a security patch that causes problems. It's not like, all updates are always going to work. I think. And a lot of that comes down to QA and testing. And I think that this is because many of these many of these companies are building their, you know, like, they're building their first internet product. Right. You know, they're using you as a testbed.
Yeah, yeah. So Oh, good. Oh, yeah.
So so, you know, it's, it's difficult, because if you don't properly QA, an update before it goes out, and that means doing QA in every possible configuration. You know, maybe you have a different type of door, maybe a different type of lock, and then you break the lock. The damage you cause is incredible. And of course, now you can do damage at scale. Right? Because Oh, not only did you break one lock, now you broke like, 1000. And in fact, you instantaneously Yeah, and in the case of lock estate, they actually had to have people send back their locks to get new boards, because the the update was so damaging it brick the device out. So what
did I actually do? That was the update fail? Yeah, so
actually, I'm going to poke at the internet really real quick here. Well, you know, while the viewers cannot cannot see this, but
that's fine. Yeah.
Yeah, the lock estate failure. Yeah, botched update breaks hundreds of smart door locks. So apparently, they they did an over the air update. They broke the device. And what what happened was is that the devices the way it bricked was that it actually killed the Wi Fi. So you have a lock that unlocks and locks over Wi Fi. And the update comes over comes over Wi Fi and then you break the Wi Fi device inside the device. So they were actually offering a replacement in 18 days. So imagine like not being able to unlock your front door for 18 days
or being a Walt you'd have to ship your lock back so you can
lock your door for 18 days. And you know the worst thing about the lock estate lock was that the way that this thing installed in your door you actually had to drill extra holes in the door to mount the lock. So if you try to add another lock Yeah, so if you try to put like you took a standard lock in the door now you have like extra holes on the door, which is fantastic. On top of that because they were so overwhelmed by the 1000s of locks failing. You couldn't get an email response for like 12 to 24 hours. So you can imagine you know, yeah, customers customer service on this mess. Yeah, wow. Not good. So
are they sold around selling product?
Oh, yes, yes happened like a couple of weeks ago. Yeah. So they last week.
You know, my guess is they probably took these locks back, they reprogram the boards and ship them out again yet because
um because speaking of breaking stuff, I was like doing some code work on my on some microcontrollers last two weeks ago and I bricked the microcontroller by accidently writing to the one of the registers that puts it to sleep. Except that was the first thing it did, and had no way to exit like even reset. It was ignoring the RESET signal. So it wouldn't you could never wake up. And while I went through like three or four, I mean, the good thing is they're like EFM, eight, so they're very inexpensive. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. But I like burned through like three or four trying to find the line of code that was doing that. Oh, my God. So think about that. You said that over. So yeah, so on the macro watches, and they all crashed.
On the on the badge that we built for DEF CON, it turned out, you could actually write into one register, and that register would lock the, it would lock the CPU. So if you if you had an update, that was a bad update, we could actually write a set of bits into the security register of the kW, one microcontroller. And once you wrote those bits, that thing was locked forever. So there was no way out. And the worst thing was that we had a compiler bug that would actually tickle that bug. So if, if you compiled on the wrong compiler, and we put something in the wrong segments, the update code that we have would actually break the badge forever. So we, we had we had we fixed that pretty quickly, like no one actually, no one triggered that bug. But that's lucky. Yeah. But you know, but the funny part is, is it's like, you understand, like, when you're working with microcontrollers, how you know how precarious everything is like, you can make a mistake so quickly. Oh,
yeah. And the answer might be buried in an app note, somewhere deep in the bowels of Oh, my God, whatever manufacturer
document. Yeah, we had, you know, we had like a 300 page document for the for the chip. And
yet I, once I found the line of code, I actually Googled it. And like, there's like one thread, like a couple pages deep into Google. And it's like, I did this and it stopped working in the next line in the next person response. Don't do that.
Have you ever seen that really famous XKCD cartoon? Where like, the guy has a problem, and then the other guy's lucky? Yeah, he's like, What have you seen? Yeah,
it's a funny we had a podcast about that.
Yeah. Yeah. That was one of the early podcasts.
Yeah. Oh, my God. Yeah. The it's XKCD wisdom of the ancients. He's like, who were you Denver coder? Nine. What did you Yeah, I'll never know you Viper. Yes. Never so close to another soul. So helplessly alone? Yeah, that's, that's one of my favorite XKCD cartoons.
Oh, yeah. Well, it's so true to have people like us that do hacking on on heart old hardware. I just bumped the mic.
You get you get the one post where it's just, I don't know what's going on. And the next post is, I fixed it. Yeah. And that's it. Thanks. Yeah. Yeah.
Go ahead, John. Oh, no. So um, let's see where were we, uh,
while I was gonna talk about forcing updates a little bit more. So the big thing is when Windows 10 came out, right, and they were like, it's so hard to disable, basically forced updates on that, right, and people complaining about it, but it's like, you know, the biggest vulnerability of Windows? Is it not being updated? Right. Now, it also goes into where basically, the sometimes windows will update, you know, break your machine, because I've actually had that happen to me once first time ever with Windows 10. Right. And it's and, you know, testing all the configurations and stuff, but it's like, with Windows, it's kind of hard
to do that. Well, you know, updates are a lot like, like politics. You know, the, the engineers want to put useful things in the updates. And then, you know, marketing wants to get some pork in there. And, and that kind of that kind of breaks the system. It's like, oh, yeah, we need to fix these two security things. And in fact, you know, Microsoft used to have a policy. It was like Patch Tuesday or something. But they used to just only release security updates. And when you start bundling, like, you know, UI changes and software changes in with the security updates. And you don't give people a choice to accept them. Then then you have an issue. And I, I think I think a lot of this kind of comes back to you know, consent. It's like, did the user gets did the user consent to this update? No. Okay, let's force it on them on them anyway, they're coming. There are some cases where it's like, look, whether you like this or not, we need to make this update to make things more secure. That's different. But, you know, it's like, if you say, Yeah, we're gonna, we're gonna make this more secure, and we're gonna change the UI that you know and love, then it's different. So, you know, unfortunately, that's not really how software works. Like, it's very difficult to, you know, to unbundle those things, right. So you say, you know, like, you're working on source code, you're like, Oh, well, you know, this stuff's going out anyway. So I think I think that's a that's a, that's a major issue. And you want to try to see if you can live in a world in which you can separate the software update and the UI changes.
Yeah. It's like, when Windows updates, it's like, Don't worry, everything's where you left it. It's like, what did you
do? What have you done? Yeah. So So yeah, there's that. Um, and then, you know, then there's a whole idea of, of like, what is a malicious update?
Yeah. And, you know,
I got it when they, when that cool IoT garage company, like, Oh, shut off that guy's service. So yeah, cuz
even on a deck on the internet, they were both
being dicks.
Yeah. Yeah. You know. So and of course, the next problem is like you have you have malicious updates from the vendor. And then you have things like, um, what happens when, you know, for example, like the company goes out of business, like, Where does your data go? What happens to the user privacy? And many, you know, many companies will sell, like, for example, like, I have a lot of, of nest devices and nest devices. They know when you're in your home, they know your schedule, because they have sensors, that is extremely private information, like what time I'm home. So if that company goes out of business, where does that data go? And that's certainly, oh, who buys it? Yeah, who buys the data? Exactly.
Which is what happened a couple of years ago, right. Yeah. Or actually, yeah, going back to like, if, if nest? Well, let's use nest as an example. Right? went out of business. And that server is not there anymore to talk to? What happens to to that device? Yeah. I
mean, ideally, ideally, either the device fails in such a way that it can still work with the remote server, or the company is good enough to distribute software that emulates their server, so you can run things in house. And I think that I think that this, this goes back to like, all, you know, anything in the cloud, right? It's like, if you cannot emulate that thing locally, then the cloud is garbage. Yeah. You know, the, like, you know, Amazon's a good example, like you can, you can run instances in Amazon that are in the cloud. But you can also download the instance and run it under something like OpenStack, which allows you to run the instance locally. So there's a way out. But most consumers are not. They're not technical. They don't have these kind of escape routes. Yeah.
It's kind of jump into a different realm. It's a valve, which has that same theme, which is their giant, like marketplace for video games. Yeah, that's basically DRM go when you boot up the game, it talks to Valve servers and says, Yeah, that's a legit copy of the game. But if somehow valve went out of business, or their server got new or something, yep. What happens to your ginormous library of video games that you purchase through Steam Sales?
Yeah, this is this is the problem with almost almost all DRM. And, you know, um, you know, recently, I think it was, I think, was Firefox. So, like, Mozilla started supporting. We're sort of making noise about supporting DRM in the browser. And it's like, no,
don't don't do that. Well, not
to get all tinfoil hat or radical or anything like that. But what if, what if, say steam said, I don't like you, or I don't like your political writings or whatever, and just said, you do not actually own these conferences. Do you have any
recourse? Well, they do do that. Basically, if your your your Steam account can get banned, and you don't have access to your stuff anymore? That's pretty awful. Yeah, that's terrible. So far, they've only done that when you've been cheating in video games, which is fully support banning them losing all their contents. Yep. Yep, yep. Yep. Do we have anything else for security on IoT?
Um, no, you know, I think I think that, you know, probably people listening to this podcast are going to be manufacturing devices that somehow connect to the internet. But I think you know, keep in mind It's like, you know, be careful about security updates. You know, if you have to force the user don't don't force other things at the same time, you know, err on the side of being more cautious and be in you know, doing more security and China to China to make a crappy Internet of shit device.
Make it make it Well, if your device needs to connect to the internet make it so. There has to be reason why. Yeah, you know, not like, you know, what was it was like an IoT water spigot. It's like, why? Yeah,
I think I think earlier, I saw an Internet of Things. garden hose. Yeah, that's
what I was looking at. Yeah.
It was like, really,
really was just like, monitor how much water?
I think? Well, I think the idea was, is that you, you know, you put a hose on it, you use it to automatically water your garden or something.
And if it does exist, that's called our watering system. Yeah, it's called the timer. Yeah.
The other the other thing that the other random mentioned is, if you make a device that that connects to the internet, think about the other way, like, think about Ingress. So for example, like, if you're building a device that has internet connectivity, maybe you should also put a firewall on it, that doesn't let people connect to it. So you know, in the case of like nest, the, they've been very good about that, like you, if you run NMAP and you try to scan a nest device, you get nothing, you can't even ping it. Yeah, so the device, the device is dead to the world. But it does connect out to send data. So that's, that's a good idea. You know, yeah,
that's, um, like SCADA systems that they use in and stuff. Those are very, and it has one connection to the outside world. And it's one way. Right.
Right. And well, in fact, we know, we know from lots of research in DEF CON talks that most SCADA systems are frighteningly insecure. That's mean that yeah, that was that, you know, if you want to go back and read a very amazing story, go read about Stuxnet. Stuxnet is one of the most amazing SCADA attacks in the world, where it's like, you know, it, not all this thing had a very specific job, it looked for a very specific system controller with a very specific device attached to it, which most likely would only be attached to centrifuges that were, you know, designed to create fissionable material for bombs. So this was the Iran attack. Yeah, the the attack, and we think that we think that was a US Israel joint project to attack that, but
it was major, or something like that. Yeah. Was a long time ago. Anyway.
And yeah, that's the thing is, is they think they that vector was a flash drive. Yeah. Yeah. So someone basically dropped the flash drive, probably near the plant, and someone picked it up and plugged it into a computer.
Yeah. I've actually, I've actually done that with, with, you know, in, in actual pen tests, where we've built, you know, five or 10 flash drives. And we've written things on them, like, you know, salary dot exe. And, you know, you put those at, you put those in, like the lunch, you know, in the cafeteria somewhere. And of course, that payload is made a split payload, and then someone clicks on it, and then you own their machine. So it works. People are done. Oh, yeah.
No, I helped set up a SCADA system when I worked up in oil and gas in Oklahoma. So I was one of those, like, how do you make sure it's secure? It's like, it only goes one way. That's right. And you make it so it doesn't control anything. It's only for data gathering. least that's what we use it
for. So you say
Alright, so we're on that current topic of crappy IoT devices. Yep. So um, oh, man. Yes. John.
Yeah, the the internet of shit account is my favorite account in Twitter. The those guys do a great job of tracking like all the garbage that's out there. Everything from well, I guess I guess this week, they're sort of banging on the the Amazon Whole Foods merger which is kind of silly, but the, you know, we have cameras, remote control sex toys, which is kind of funny, because they're like, oh, in 1980. I bet there will. There will be flying cars in the future in 2017. This toy can be controlled from anywhere in the world.
Yeah, we're looking at it right now. Yeah. Oh, Bluetooth. We actually had a we had a podcast about that a little while ago when there was an adult toy that where the camera was accessible would not be. Yeah.
Oh, no, no, the thing was about it is when you turn it on, if it had a Wi Fi access That would broadcast that. It was like, I can't remember what it was the name of the SEC story, right? Oh, yeah. God. publicly. Yeah. Privacy. What
an area?
Yeah. Um, the other I, my, one of my favorite photos is a, they have a faucet where the faucet is dumping a Linux stack trace the faucet, the faucet has had a kernel panic. Like, you should not be running Linux on your faucet. I'm just saying.
And that thing is what even if it had Linux, so whatever is What advantages does that give you over a regular faucet?
I don't even know.
Cuz like a lot of times, like the internet of shit is like, Oh, we put a TV in your refrigerator. It's like, I I can't get away from my TV for five seconds. I need a TV to tell me what to do. It's like what was it when you go to the because they have TVs and gas station pumps now. Oh, god. Yeah. Yeah. That's the most annoying thing ever. It's like, I don't want to listen to the news.
Half the time their ads? Yeah. To their ads.
Yeah, got Mountain Dew
Bronto. The first mutilator
electrolytes, but half of this stuff seems like it's just made because it can be it's almost like a joke. It's just like, well, we can so we do actually, yeah,
that faucet is a faucet with a screen on it. And it's probably just like displaying ads while you watch. Yeah,
we could run doom. They always
um, there was actually something I saw. This may have been on the internet of shared account or somewhere else. But it was it was incredible. There was a gas station had this little, you know, monitor running ads. But what they were doing was the device was actually catering ads to what you know what people were so it would it would look at you it would do some very mild machine vision, or machine learning work. And it would say, Oh, I think there's a middle aged man standing in front of this device. I'm going to show a different ad.
Yeah, we talked about that. Oh, yeah. I actually kind of erred on the side of that's really cool and interesting. Yeah, it was it was an invasion of privacy, but you're on private land that someone else owns it a store. So well. That's
true. I mean, there is no, you know, I think there's there's probably a lot of case law about this where it's like you have no right to privacy. You know, in someone else's private space.
Yeah, cuz it's what is it? Um, even in public space, someone else in Listen, America, someone else can record you in a public space. Right. And but does that extend to running analytics on you now? Well, yeah,
it does now.
Well, that took place in Europe, which actually has really strong like, recording policies like you want in public.
All Europe has much better privacy law than than we do in the US. You know, hands down,
unless you're listening in England.
Yeah, unless Well, I mean, England has massive amounts of you know, public CCTV. Like it's it's Orwell's nightmare. So
it's like a year the teacher Rama upset with the iPhone where they put the phone in their eye and it's just automatically playing add like into their nice, nice. Anyway, that was a good
so I IoT devices. I actually like I guess, as our as our next topic. Um, well, you know, I think I think the nest is very good. I haven't had any problems with it. I don't think it's really revealing too much about my lifestyle.
You'd like to control your EMI?
Yeah, I'm a big fan of, of tile. Have you seen tile? Tile is amazing. Like you put a tile on your keys, you put one in your wallet, you put one with all your stuff. And if you if you leave the house with all of your things, and then you try to go home, and you leave one of your things behind. It will send you a message, which is pretty amazing. So it's like, Hey, you left the house? Yeah, no title. I think house independent. T IO.
Right. Right. Right. Is the first bank was an Amazon link. So it's like okay, yeah,
um, but anyway, they it's Kyle, Kyle app.com. Um, I have, I have had that thing saved my butt so many times. I once I once went to a went to a bar. My wallet fell out of my bag. I went home, it's sent me a message that said, Hey, you left your wallet behind. Very cool. Yeah. And the nice thing is like when you're in your house, you can you can page your phone from your keys and paid your keys from your phone. So I think that those guys are going to go They're going to go pretty far. And it's about 25 bucks per Yeah, that 20 bucks per i think i think i own five of them. Now and I, I you know, every year, they give you a discount because the batteries do eventually die, but the, you know, they're 1020 bucks each to buy them again. And extremely awesome, because let's face it, like having to go to the DMV or having to go get your wallet back is worth way more than 20 bucks.
Oh, yeah. And just emotional distress.
Oh my god. So yeah, so there's that. Um, they work. The device itself transmits Bluetooth low energy, okay, and they they send a unique ID number. And the way it works is your phone communicates to the device using BLE. And then if the I think it's like every, every 10 minutes or so it sends a ping. And then if you lose something, then what it does is it notifies every single other person who's running tile. So anyone else with a phone? Who has the tile software, it'll say, Look, you know, device number 12345 is lost. If you see that device, please send me a message. So it, it uses the power of the network to find your stuff.
It's a mesh network.
Oh, so if you lose something, it doesn't just tell you that it's lost. It could potentially tell you where it is
if Yeah, people in the area of running with tile. Yeah,
that's right. So that's that's, that's very, very, very cool. There's been a couple of other companies that have tried to do this. But I think tiles kicking butt on that. Plus sounds
like you kind of need a critical mass of users in your area. So works well.
Yeah. Well, you know, in San Francisco, Everyone's a nerd. So. Yeah, and a
lot of that's the point of the company is to make that critical mass. Yeah.
Like it might work. Okay, like downtown Houston. But like in the suburbs?
Oh, yeah. I think if you're in the suburbs, you're screwed. But but the thing is, if you are in a suburbs, that the that sort of abandonment alarm will still work. Yes, I will tell you that you're missing the keys, right? Yeah, you're in. So it does do this thing, where it's like if you leave the house with a bunch of stuff, and then you come back to the house, and you're missing stuff it knows. So that's pretty sweet. So it's a combination of GPS and Bluetooth.
Bluetooth Low Energy. Yeah, I was just meant to ask how does it know that you got home?
Oh, well, because the the device is running, you know, location data in the background? Right. So, you know, I'm sure there's a risk of locational privacy there. But it's, it's reasonable, you know, um, what else do I like? Um, I don't know, most of my house has Insteon wireless devices in it. They're not on the internet. They're on an Insteon network, which is a, you know, local, I think it's like 900 megahertz network for running light switches and things like that, that works pretty well. I have about 30 devices on the network here that are either light switches or otherwise, so that's pretty cool. Aside from that, not too sure. I don't I don't have too much else on the IoT front.
You have anything, Stephen? Hmm,
I don't think so. I mean, every once while throw up a Raspberry Pi up, but right, for only a short period of time. Really? Yeah, about that.
Um, I'm brew pie working
craft craft beer and beer craft beer pie had that I'm running on that actually does use the default password.
Oh, does it pi pi. Pi raspberry. Oh, yeah. Pi
raspberry. So, but I was I was just running it for a test for some time. And I if I was going to use that on a more regular basis, I would certainly change that. Right? Yeah. I'm not really IoT II.
Yeah, I'm, I'm trying to like what else I have, I have, um, I have some of these, like, cheap Chinese LED controllers in the bar here. And I wrote, I wrote a bunch of code to talk to them, but they, they communicate over UDP. And you can send messages to them to tell them to change the change the lights and things like that. And I have source code for that on my, on my GitHub. But yeah, not a lot here. At one point, we consider putting the blinds on the internet. We didn't do that. We have some some few devices here, which are notoriously hard to remote control without proprietary software. But you know, for those, I do have code for the hack RF the communicates with them. But that requires a bunch of work.
But yeah. Anyway, you got anything. Um, I actually have played with it's kind of a little bit different. It's like, it's like a satellite of things, I guess. Oh, I've been working a little bit with with the what was the rock block, which is the Iridium satellite network. Oh, really. It's like a modular, you can buy it like Spark phone or whatever. And and you don't get that much data. But it's really good when you need to push like, you know, just a couple bytes of information up into the cloud. And that's, that's it. It's like just like the swarm of satellites.
So that thing is that that's, that's an actual Iridium modem. Yeah. Wow. That's amazing.
Yeah, it's a really cool little device and doesn't cost that much money to run. Right? It's like 250 bucks to buy the module. And then it's like,
yeah, do you have to pay a monthly to talk to a radio? Yeah,
but you got to pay monthly on it. Yeah. Which it's not too bad, though. for it. It is. I mean, you don't get a lot data, like, right, cuz I had like the low end plan right now, since I'm not really, I really worked on it in like, couple months. But um, but the idea is basically, you know, like, basically, take it the GPS unit and shove it into the jeep. And then now I know where the Jeep is at all times. And while I go off roading, my parents will know, you know where I'm at.
The last time I the last time I use a radium. This was last year I was on safari in Namibia, Africa. And there was nothing. I mean, you could get out of the truck, you could spin around in a 360. And all you saw was horizon. And it was the most it was the most confusing thing for your little brain to deal with. That there was nothing and you pull up a radio and there was nothing, you know. So Iridium was the only way to communicate out there. Yeah. Yeah. If you've ever seen the movie Mad Max, that's where most of the most of the last Mad Max movie was filmed. Like the Fury Road was filmed in Namibia. And I was standing on that Fury Road. It was crazy.
And with all our, with this whole hurricane business is Oh, yeah, actually really wish I tried it out during the hurricane. It's just like, I didn't have any power.
The booted up? Yeah, so Well, I
want to connect to the clouds that apparently they can think about building like a kind of like a weather monitoring, like maybe like a house monitoring system. Like it says the house has got power. And
like not like, like Nagios for your house? Yeah, basically,
just like really simple stuff, and maybe some temperature data and stuff like that. And just have it you know, you know, every hour or so go up and just ping. Right? Because, you know, cuz my house lost power on Monday, and it hasn't got back yet. But it'd be nice to know, you know, when the power came back on. So, you know, when I went home, I can have nice, nice.
You just need a maybe like a ping or something. Yep. I you know, it's funny. In my house, I actually have two of these very old Baytech RPC three power strips. And I have them connected to my local network. And I use them to ping the internet. So if the if I lose internet connectivity, I then connect to that device. And I have a script that automatically reboots my my modem. And because I said modem failures all the time. So it said that it's a neat thing. You can build like a very simple watchdog script. And you could use something like that, like when it boots up to send a message. Yeah, saying oh, hey, all the powers connected.
I'm alive again. Yeah. Um,
well, um, you know, I'm glad to hear you guys are okay, down there. It sounds. It sounds crazy. Sounds like a lot of flooding.
Yeah, it really depends on where you're at. Yeah, well, same thing with New Orleans. Oh,
yeah. You know, the thing that's crazy is i Nobody can be accurate in any kind of sense right now. But the predictions right now is that 15 to 20 trillion gallons of water fell out of use? Oh, my God, Katrina dumped 6.5 trillion gallons. So Wow. We're three times as much as Katrina.
Yeah. And you know, it's, it's it's so different because you're a little more inland than then, you know,
and slightly higher elevation than New Orleans.
I mean, wow. I mean, it's easy to be negative.
What were the highest point in Houston? The highest natural point, Houston. I think it's 55 feet.
Oh, my God. Well, you know, you know, we're we're in the same boat here in San Francisco. I mean, like, you know, I can see the water.
Your weather is a little bit nicer than ours. In general.
Yeah. Well, 55 degrees 60% Humidity all year. Wow. At least you know, actually today's crazy today's like it's supposed to get to 114. In Livermore this weekend. So Friday, Saturday. I mean, right now it's about at downtown which is crazy for us.
But yeah, actually got to add when the hurricane hit and I thought it was freezing outside.
Wow. Oh yeah, because you guys,
but it was like 98 before the hurricane showed up. So we got Yeah. Yeah. So I guess we move on to the batch bad stuff.
Yay. So, um, so yeah, so we spent the last year building a badge for for DEF CON 25. It was a amazing, amazing amount of educational and very, very educational experience. We had great help from macro fab. And we also had, you know, we had problems that we created and got created during the process. But all in all, I think it was, I think it was a good experience. We, we built a wearable video game for DEF CON 25. It was largely based on the DC a teen ninja networks badge. So you could take your badge, walk up to someone else at the conference, press a button and fight them, which was super cool. But you know, it was our first big hardware project. So we, we had a lot of mistakes, I think. I think we you know, it's like what we were talking about before, before with the Internet of Things. When you build a device that contains firmware, and you make mistakes, the mistakes scale up very easily. We we had problems with our chip with our chip footprints that created a few more board spins through macro fab that we really wish we didn't did didn't do rather, we also use an LED called the WS 2812 which was absolutely terrible. The you know, you want to be able to use you know, most of the most of the the electronics things that are happening these days, most people are doing surface mount technology, we don't want to use through hole on new board designs because through hole takes time. And the WS 2812 B is a RGB LED that is surface mountable. But unfortunately, it's so brittle, it doesn't survive the oven process. So people that are that haven't done surface mount projects before, might not understand what's been happening with sort of the, the push towards aro HS and rrhs is a lead free process for producing electronics. The unfortunate thing about lead free process is that it's a much higher temperature. So you know, we had this choke all year with badge life. We said make make solder let it again. Make America Great Again. You know, leaded solder melts at a much lower temperature. Typically that's around you know, 600 degrees Celsius or in some blends. It's like 390 some odd, sorry, 600 degrees Fahrenheit 300 Celsius 300 400 300 Something Celsius. Um, unfortunately, a plastic melts around. I think the lead free temperature is like what it's like 700 or something, it's much higher
is to our oven runs at 255 Celsius
to 35 Celsius. So I three process yeah to be 55 Celsius at Google to Fahrenheit.
Yeah, and that's that's that for heat.
That's four. Yes. 491. Right. So normally, I think you know, when you're soldering you typically have your iron set to like 650. But then that's because you're just you're just barely touching it. Right. So for content for continued use, I think I think unleaded solder I think is like, it's like 350 or something is much lower. Anyway, you can all look up all these specs on the internet, I don't really memorize them very well. But the the thing is, is like the WS 2012 Beat it melts internally at a much lower temperature. So when you put it through a an on leaded solder process, and you put in the oven, the the little LEDs, the little wires inside the LED, they self destruct
and the wirebonds die by
the die bond self destruct. So we had, so we manufactured like 225 devices, we had approximately 100 of them fail because of, you know, random led problems. And then we had a whole bunch more fail because like our chip footprint was bad. And then we had even more fail because we we neglected to tell macro fab how to correctly program these things. Because had we put like one more line of information in our programming notes. You know, everything would have been better. But you know, the thing is, when you're manufacturing devices, you have to be very explicit. And you know, a lot of people if you read, there's a wonderful book that Andrew Wong wrote called the hardware hacker, and he talks about going to Shenzhen going to China and manufacturing this thing called the champ B, which was a kind of like plushy electronics device that came out in the early 2000s. But he talks about how explicit you have to be about your hardware design, and, you know, everything, the hardware, the firmware programming, it's a lot of work to put these projects together. So, you know, I think we learned a lot of good lessons for next year. Next year, we're not going to use a 2012 b we'll probably use our will probably use discrete RGB LEDs with the is a really wonderful Texas Instruments LED controller that the guys from queer con used and I think we'll probably use that for next year. And then we'll probably use a different microcontroller that has a much easier, you know, ability to solder to the board. And I think, I think that that's, that's another big thing is like, you know, component selection when you're manufacturing at scale is super important. We wish we had used something that had like the ssop You know, the the chip package with the legs sticking out of it. Oh yeah. UEFI Yeah, Q FP like or instead of using the you know, what we use a v v f LGA very, very fine. Something gate array, large grid array Yeah, yeah, yeah, we i i will never send you guys that chip again. Because it was so awful um, so you know, next year I think we're probably going to look at like the BMD 300, or the BMD 340, which is by riguardo. And that's what was used on the and not XOR badge, very, very easy chip to work with it, it has a very small amount of pins on the bottom. And you can see them which is great. But, you know, it's funny, because I think we I think I sorta got this crash course in like, in surface mount repair surface mount technology. And I, I started out as an electrical engineer in my sort of college career and then the, you know, the internet happens in the mid 90s. And I dropped everything and worked on the internet, which was a good a good idea at the at the end of it all. But, you know, I really wanted to get back into electrical engineering, which is why we did this project. So very successful I think,
well, you get you get the kind of the good and the little bit of the bad parts of it.
Yeah, yeah. I
mean, I'm not you know, I'm I'm not mad about it. I'm really happy the way things worked out. I think it was extremely fun. And, you know, probably the best thing for us was walking around DEF CON and seeing everyone playing the video game. That was so cool.
That's awesome. How was it? How was it received at DEF CON?
Well, we got we got great press. We we had a couple of big sponsors. We had a vast hacker, Avast hacker warehouse grim if I if I miss one, they'll be mad at me. And we also had Phobos group but a lot of our a lot of our sponsors were really happy with it with the badge. The biggest problem we had was like we had a lot of screens break because they were made of glass and people get drunk.
Say they get aggressive all fighting each other on these devices.
Yeah, right. So we had that problem. We had some people break the speaker as we had some capacitors go flying off the board. So you know it's funny you had the engineer for for damage.
That's the thing is they have like you know, you're designed to be child safe and stuff. They get to be a new thing for DEF CON badges is designed for drunkenness. Seriously.
So your badges around here affectionately got the Name of the Game Boy boards will always caught on that around here. And everyone knew exactly what Yeah,
yeah, the Gameboy badge. Um, yeah, we also had to say we also have sponsorship from Red team. They were great too, and urbane security. The badges we, when I design them, I I started out with a circle. That was the first thing I put through macro fab. And we put them on and we said, oh my god, I look like flavor flavor. I cannot wear this. It was like a big clock. And we were like, no, no, not gonna happen. And then I like kind of had the iPhone. I had the iPhone six in my hand. And I said, You know what? This feels right? Like this, the size of the iPhone six. So we sort of took the iPhone six, it was like the six s plus. And then I found the shape of a Roman Bath. And so that's the that's the outline. It's a Roman. It's like a Roman bathtub. Because we're kind of keeping with this Caesar's Palace Roman theme. But we spend right
because it had it had all of branches on either side, right? Yeah.
Yep. Yeah. So we spent, we spent a year writing the software. I had had a really great friend Matt, who is the artist and then Bill, who I think you talked to once Bill Paul was he he is an incredible firmware engineer. He works for Wind River and he's worked on on VX works for like, the Mars Rover and stuff. So I couldn't have picked a better person to to do that. The low level code God if
he did over air update to the Mars rover and it bricked it, no.
Yeah, you'd be in trouble. That'd be like, yeah.
Yeah, space Internet of shit.
Yeah, it'd be a year and a half to get your return on that one.
Oh, yeah, I took this leap up to go into sleep. It's never coming back.
I think I think those things do. They do an update process, which is very similar to, you know, if you remember the TiVo DVR, when they act, they run two processors. So they run, you know, they run one firmware, and then you can always reboot and go to the other firmware. And I think that that's, I think, like, the rover stuff works like that as well. Unfortunately, like, our badge has one firmware. And we actually made we actually made a couple of mistakes in the firmware that were that were like, life threatening mistakes for the game. So like, we actually had, we had overflows in the code. So like, one of the things that we did, we had a, we have a counter that keeps track of how much XP you've earned. And I think it was like an unsigned 16 bit integer. So once you overflow, the unsigned 16 bit ends all hell broke loose, which was pretty funny. So you started earning like negative XP? It's crazy. Yeah. And then the other thing we had was, you know, we had some cases where the actual main CPU did not fully adhere to the board. And it turned out that like, you know, once I got the boards under a microscope, and I started like fixing those problems, I could, I could restore the boards to 100%. And I also got really good, incredibly at D soldering the full chip, and then putting the chip back on again, which is crazy, because there's 64 pins under that chip.
We'll do it doing it with a hot air gun. Yeah, hot air
and a microscope. Yeah. And that was that was pretty impressive. I, I have to give you this. This is crazy. If if you have not seen this guy on the internet, you have to go watch him. You go on YouTube and search for a guy his name is Louis Rossmann. He runs a independent Mac repair. It's like a repair company in in New York, and this guy, everything I know. He's a wizard, everything I know about repairing surface mount. I learned by watching his channel
that his stuffs really good. He also shits on Apple as often as he can. Oh, he
hates apple. Well, you know what good, right? Because? Because, you know, Apple has spent so much time building their devices to be unrepairable. Oh, yeah. But anyway, that being said, like, you know, he does his electronics thing, and then he goes home with his cat. And then he does like philosophy. It's absolutely unreal. Yeah. But he's, uh, you know, it was really great to watch that and be like, oh, oh, so that's how that's how you use flux. That's how you remove a chip. Oh, that's how you re solder like, you know, oh, I should buy these tweezers. Oh, I should have this repair station. Really amazing. It was like a free college course. In surface mount.
And yeah, it's actually when that guy in this couple the videos I basically send to, like, I have, like friends that are like, are still in school and stuff. And yeah, like going, how do I do this? I'm like, look at these and learn and then do it.
Seriously, like, yeah, just watch this guy. But yeah, I you know, I, up until a year ago, I had never I've never worked on surface mount before. And when we started building things, I said, Oh my God, you know, electronics has changed so much. There's no more through hole everything surface mountain, what do I do? So you know, now it's now it's different. Like now I want a microscope. Now I have the HAKO hot air station, the micro soldering pencil. And, you know, we, we bought those things, because our, our badge project like all in all was about, let's say it was about $33,000 for the project. And we raised, you know, we raised about 26,000. And all the other money came from us and other sponsors, but the you know, the big deal was is like, there were times in which we said, oh, we have to buy we have to buy the microscope, we have to buy the hot air station because if we don't, we're going to lose more money. You know, like being able to do inspection and repair at home was a big deal. It probably recovered about 20 to $25,000 in the project.
So yeah. Sounds good. Has great.
So Steven, do you have something for Stephens game? I do, but let's give him the game. So Stephens game is basically Stephens going to have a question, and there are no wrong answers. Okay. So go ahead and go.
Okay, so I felt I was thinking about a handful of things, and then I threw them all out the window and I I thought, Okay, if you could design an IoT device, what would it be go? Oh,
um, I think cheese if I could design an IoT device, I think I think right now there's a giant, the the home automation space is a giant nightmare. And there's all these different competing protocols. So I think, I think Maybe if I if I can build something, I probably fix that problem first. Like nothing, nothing talks to each other. So like you have, you know, Lutron and Insteon. And all these, you know, Belkin garbage and Philips Hue devices. And there's no device that talks to all the things. So IoT glue, basically IoT glue, like, fix, fix the protocol problem, and then and then try to make it open source. Because, you know, right now, I think
that'd be a copyright nightmare for I know, right.
I think, you know, I think a big problem is like I have, I have like, the some fee blinds in my house. Right. And that's a proprietary protocol that somebody has been very deliberate in keeping people out of like, and I, I think that you that sort of advancement in the home automation space is not going to happen until these protocols and we're open. But yeah, there's that. Um, I might also work on like, a door, like a door lock that's actually secure. Unlike the lock estate devices, so I don't know.
Awesome. That was those excellent, incredibly quick, for just a blind question like that. Yeah. So I'll tell you what I do. Yeah, I'd make I'd make a beer kit that has a bunch of sensors in it that tells you the liquid level and temperature and the location
to Oh, no, forget where your peers you could pay now you can use Well,
I think I think he's just put a tile on it.
Just put just put it No, but it's gonna be built into it.
Oh, cuz cuz it's like, it's like, oh, liquid level? Well, obviously, that will be zero very quickly, if you can.
You also made it sarcastic like that? Yeah. could speak to you. Yeah, you're like you could do is you can put these in bars, like you can put on glasses and stuff. And so that the bartender or waitress will bring your beer, right when it empties.
Oh, that's a great idea. If you just have this huge monitoring wall. Yeah, that shows
liquid was that that actually gives it where you can actually use it now. I just turned it from an Internet of shit thing to actually Internet of Things. Okay,
so if you have an app that goes along with it, and that have you select what your next beer will be when you're done. So just automatically shows up?
What if the beer can told you where the bathroom was?
It would it could talk you to the bathroom? You're like, Hey, man, you've
had three beers bathroom is up and to the left. Yeah. That'd be great.
If you're at like Las Vegas, where you have no idea where the BAT Oh
my god. Oh my god, I can't tell you like the struggle. The struggle is real. Trying to find your way through. You're like, I'm in the casino. Actually, the worst. The worst thing, by the way, just random badge note. The worst thing that we did during the entire badge process was offering to bring people their badges when they were in the casino. Because you could not find it. You're like, where are you? I'm next to the slot machine. You're like, which one is billions of them?
Oh my god. I didn't You didn't throw them in the fountain outside. Did you
know I did spend most of DEF CON in the hotel room soldering, which is probably a bad thing. But you know, the one day we got to go to the pool. It was like, oh, yeah, hey, we're not soldering anymore. This is amazing.
Yeah, awesome. So Parker, IoT ID?
Oh, um,
you know,
you know, the, it's already exists my one, which is why I'm building that that rock block, you know, satellite the things thing. Okay. But if an actual IoT device I probably would like, if my tools like my power tools, the batteries would report their battery level. So I knew if I had needed to charge it, or if I lent it out to someone, they always return it dead. And I'm like, oh, yeah, you know, whatever. And I just stored away in and I knew use it on Saturday, and it's dead. It's gonna
get a little bit douchey to track your battery level. What? Someone's borrowing it. Yeah.
Wow. Exactly. Yeah.
Yeah, I guess. I guess if you don't trust your friends don't let it out.
No one is, it's just, it's more on me where I get it back. So I can go hey, charge it, you know,
so I'll go and charge it. Yeah, it's kind of like a Be Kind Rewind. Yeah, you want to be kind recharge.
Yeah, I have I have three of those DeWalt batteries. I just keep them charging all the time. Because, you know, might need them.
Yeah, yeah. Where that plumbing got here in Houston. Is it so hot? Like because I know they're in the garage. And so I can basically keeping them topped up on the charger that actually damaged lithium. So I don't have them on charger at all. Until I'll gonna use them.
That's something inside
what's air conditioned?
must be the device to monitor.
Yeah, monitor the temperature. It must be so hot there.
I just I, I just can't imagine,
you know, this week has been crazy, because it's supposed to be like 100. And it's like 75 Wow. It feels good. But tomorrow supposed to be 90 now? Oh, well,
maybe it'll dry up the all that water.
Or just make it muggy making mosquitoes go crazy. So, yeah. Oh, wait, you have anything else?
I just gonna say? Well, we will we will certainly be hitting you guys up pretty soon. We're starting to work on next year's badge. I have no idea what it's going to be yet. But that's v2 badge light v2. It's coming. Yep.
Do you have any you have any secrets? You want to share on that? Or is it too early?
Well, I have a couple secrets I could I could probably get out there. I think I think we really want to do another game. I think we had a lot of fun with the game. And I think that we might have to do something a little different. And there's a lot of people asking us if we'll make it compatible with with last year's radio. So if we can write the software and get the radio chip on there, we'll do it. But I think it's I think it's gonna be super hard because the radio we were using was inside of the processor. But apparently it's available as a separate chip. But we're trying to keep the cost down. So, you know, as usual badge life has conflicting issues.
Oh, absolutely. Everything is a trade off. Right.
Everything is a trade off. And there were a lot of stuff I think we did great. I think the bad I think the battery life was amazing. We had like 12 hour battery life and I think the the charging circuit worked and the LEDs were good when they worked. But we got to we got to find a company that's going to sell us a hopefully a plastic you know, childproof or drunk proof screen. I gotta work. I gotta, I gotta see if I can find someone in China that will suddenly a plastic screen because glass is ridiculous. We had so many so many screens break. But we're thinking maybe, you know, maybe like the Greeks versus the Romans would be pretty interesting or something like that. So we're gonna, we're gonna follow that up for the next few months and see where it goes kind of like ah ah, I love that game. It's one of my favorite games.
Isn't there another one coming out here soon?
I I used to.
I used to play that thing in the 90s I have no idea where it is these days.
Yeah, I think I think there is another AOE coming out. Wow.
They came out with the Age of Empires two HD edition. It's like oh, yeah, cool. It's like oh yo did it and all I did was just make it like compatible with higher resolution screens and fixed like all the bugs are still like really low resolution stuff blown up to my 4k monitor. I'm like yeah, that's not what I wanted in the HD edition.
Man I played StarCraft the other day the original scar wow and wow it looks terrible
wow you know it's like going back and playing WoW, like wow looks terrible these days. You know, I just it's video games like I just finished the uncharted four that was that was amazing. It was like nine hours was super quick but it's great. So I guess the next the next big game release on ps4 I'm looking forward to is half life three right half life three and and Life is Strange. Which is
why Playstation 28
Yeah, game no will be dead by then. Yeah,
that might be the only way the game gets made Wow, that got dark
Playstation 28 That'll be out when you know future Rama is his life
yeah, it's it's actual reality. Yeah.
Now well, admins Futurama will actually take the Simpson spot on Fox
life he will happen before that.
You know, you know we did have that thing in our game where we we love the we love the extra guys so much. We actually put Bender in the in the game. Oh, really? Yeah. On our badge. If you put in the secret code of bbbbb five, five B's then you can find this vendor.
What actually I think that's gonna be the secret code for our podcast this week. So we have a secret code word. If you email the secret code word of BBB BBB five bs to podcast that Mecca. fab.com will send some sweet swag your way. Cool.
Excellent. So yeah.
Are we gonna wrap up? Yeah, I
think that's I think that's good. So John.
Yeah, I
just knocked the mic again. John. So where can people find more about you and stuff that you do?
Yeah, I'm uh, I'm on Twitter as nedic Ne t ik I also infrequently Update retina dotnet slash tech, which is my tech blog, which I haven't touched in a while, but it's um, I think I think if you want to get my my latest notes, go look at netic on Twitter. And then for information about the badge, it's sp QR badge on Twitter. And we'll, we'll probably update that as as we get closer to things like Kickstarter and, you know, badge details for next year. So,
so thank you, John, for being on the podcast and bearing with our technical difficulties with the hurricane.
Yeah, no, I'm surprised you're still running. That's amazing. Well, I guess that was the macro fab engineering podcast and I was your guest John Adams.
And we're your hosts Parker, Dolman and Steven Craig. Later Everyone, take
it easy. Take care.
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