Parker modifies car parts and assembles the Thermal Detonator and Stephen starts working with STM32 microcontrollers.
Stephen shows off his ribbon microphone created from scratch and Parker reveals the future of the PinHeck REV8 Platform.
Toaster controllers, Hexa Precision, I2S Audio DACs, and Bagels.
Visit our Slack Channel and join the conversation in between episodes!
Parker is an Electrical Engineer with backgrounds in Embedded System Design and Digital Signal Processing. He got his start in 2005 by hacking Nintendo consoles into portable gaming units. The following year he designed and produced an Atari 2600 video mod to allow the Atari to display a crisp, RF fuzz free picture on newer TVs. Over a thousand Atari video mods where produced by Parker from 2006 to 2011 and the mod is still made by other enthusiasts in the Atari community.
In 2006, Parker enrolled at The University of Texas at Austin as a Petroleum Engineer. After realizing electronics was his passion he switched majors in 2007 to Electrical and Computer Engineering. Following his previous background in making the Atari 2600 video mod, Parker decided to take more board layout classes and circuit design classes. Other areas of study include robotics, microcontroller theory and design, FPGA development with VHDL and Verilog, and image and signal processing with DSPs. In 2010, Parker won a Ti sponsored Launchpad programming and design contest that was held by the IEEE CS chapter at the University. Parker graduated with a BS in Electrical and Computer Engineering in the Spring of 2012.
In the Summer of 2012, Parker was hired on as an Electrical Engineer at Dynamic Perception to design and prototype new electronic products. Here, Parker learned about full product development cycles and honed his board layout skills. Seeing the difficulties in managing operations and FCC/CE compliance testing, Parker thought there had to be a better way for small electronic companies to get their product out in customer's hands.
Parker also runs the blog, longhornengineer.com, where he posts his personal projects, technical guides, and appnotes about board layout design and components.
Stephen Kraig began his electronics career by building musical oriented circuits in 2003. Stephen is an avid guitar player and, in his down time, manufactures audio electronics including guitar amplifiers, pedals, and pro audio gear. Stephen graduated with a BS in Electrical Engineering from Texas A&M University.
Special thanks to whixr over at Tymkrs for the intro and outro!
Welcome to the macro fab engineering podcast. We are your hosts, Mike Williams and Parker Dolan. This is episode 95.
So Steven is in Tijuana. So we have Mike Williams on.
Glad to be back. I had so much fun the last time that I decided that I should come back.
You're the only person I asked today and say no. So
I don't know why anybody would say no to this. There's beer.
So Williams, you didn't actually didn't talk about this last time on the podcast. But what is this hacker box that you get in the mail?
Oh, it sounds like an ad. That we should be at least get out. What was the thing last week with Al Williams? Everybody's given us t shirts. I should at least get a t shirt for this.
Yeah. You mentioned that you want to talk about it. So
yeah, it's just uh, you know, something to keep me playing with a little bit of hardware on a regular basis and learning new things. It's basically a surprise box that comes in the mail. Everyone's
a Loot Crate. That's what the kids call it.
And the way they call that Loot Crate, Loot Crate loot. Loot Crate, okay. Yes, it's a Loot Crate, I guess. And it's basically, you know, they, they put together a theme of gadgets and gizmos to play with every month, and this month was The, they call it vision quest. And it's basically a little Arduino Nano and a camera and a pan tilt head. So the everything yeah, they give you everything all is like a little complete. It's not really a kit because you don't you know, they don't say plug this into that. But they give you all the tools that you need to go and play with a specific theme or activity that month. And this month it was computer vision and not cool. They've got links to open CV and all that they teach you how like install Open CV and stuff they walk if they depending on how much you want to get involved with any one of the different steps you can either wing it yourself completely just play with the stuff right out of the box, or you can follow some of their
setup steps. Yeah,
I'll help you walk through it and get your feet wet before you start going off on your own project. Yeah,
it's coming like a little box or something like that. Yeah,
it's a little box about yay big
people that listening totally know what
you know, yay. Bigger than a bread now it's actually smaller than a breadbox so it's I'd say it's about six inches by four inches by two or three inches. Okay.
Yeah. It's having any cool things on the outside of it. The occasional
sticker. Occasional sticker. Okay, cool. Yeah, usually give me a couple stickers along with it.
How much does one of those costs?
I'd have to look at the price. I think it's like 40 bucks a month you pay for it? And then you you know because they are able to do all sorts of volume buying and yeah, package it up all at once you get it usually a little cheaper than if you bought all the stuff yourself. Yeah, my cart. Yeah. That's yeah. So and it keeps all the you know, toys coming every month. Oh, yeah.
Now that way you can you get you spend your your budget allocation for gadgets and gizmos automatically shows
up. Exactly. Just give me toys. That's yeah, that's what they call me get my, my sign on on some of the GitHub and all his gadget junkie schedule. It's fitting.
Yeah. So yeah, you got to bring that fine. So yeah, I'll bring it in. Take a look at a refund. Yeah. So on. I guess they assume you plugging this into a PC then? Yeah, it came with a Danno.
Yeah, well, yeah, it came with a nano, you do need a computer for this particular one. They usually have some sort of little dev board that you need to program from a computer. Gotcha. I don't know if it's PC specific or for work with my MAC or whatever. But yeah,
cool. I like the name. So, project I've been working on for a long, long time, the pin hack board. Okay, rev eight, and line. Almost done. I finished a schematic over the weekend. So like, you know, grafting the Raspberry Pi three on or compute module onto a and got all the interchange up because we you know, we ripped the prop off the board. And so we had to reconfigure some of the data lines like over it freed
up a bunch of space, and then you're proceeding to use all of that anymore.
So yeah, and so I fit, you know, finish all the net listing, got all that working, and then added some do some extra features that we wanted to add. So we added that in onto the schematic and made sure there was gonna be enough board layout space, because we pretty much used all We had leftover on just a Raspberry Pi compute module. It's pretty big. It's like
a four inch by two inch. And it's got a lot of connections on there too, right? Yeah. 200 some
odd parts. Yeah, over, over 100 of those are like ground connections. And so I actually routed all the ground connections over the weekend to just to get that out of the way. And then got the LV DS set up, routed. I've just like bulk routing now just like doing 90 degrees, just making sure stuff would fit. And now it had enough clearance around some of the spots.
We don't want to do totally 90 degrees, because then like, Oh, yes, it's the corner instead of going smoothly around.
Eggs, electrons care. Electrons or like, electrons are like to be like, the muscle car. They only go
they go straight line, right? Straight line. Yeah. Not like one of those little English sports card electrons that can make it around those type turns. Yeah.
Well, no, cuz this is gonna get way off in like, explain a joke that I'm gonna. Yeah, whatever. Anyways, I'm gonna do it. So you know, electrons have different spin. And then putting a spin on a like, if you're playing ping pong, it's putting English on it, right? Yeah, yeah. English electrons that induce a spin. So they go around the corner on the
train. Is that why you have that where you get the Imperial electrons versus the metric electrons?
Maybe? Yeah, okay. No one English, they probably use Imperial electrons. Yes, they have a mix of everything. Yes. So. Oh, so yeah. So the reason why I do 90s, at this moment, in my routing site, I always do different steps. So first of all, we'll just place the parts out, and then I'll start routing, the critical traces. And I just map those out by just doing 90 degree lines. Because I can go back later, it's easier to edit a 90 degree line than having to change a 45 degree line. And because when you move a point up on a 45, it doesn't make the line 45.
Yet, right? It's now 72.3, or whatever. Yeah, that exact angle. How do you learn this stuff from scratch you just by doing it? Or is there a good source for someone who well, I learned
all from scratch. I had a background in drafting. I took drafting school and, and learned Autodesk AutoCAD 2000 was what we learned on and I kind of just, I was like, I want to make a circuit board board. And then I doubt I went like, I've looked online, and you couldn't do it back then there wasn't really any free ones. But there wasn't one that was called free PCB. Oh, I remember that one. And it doesn't. It doesn't have a schematic editor. Yeah, so I drew everything,
you know, straight from your head to finish. Yeah. So I
would draw the parts out, because it had a library editor. So you can draw parts out, drew the parts out and then named all the pins what they should be called and all that stuff in? And then I wrote up the netlist in. So I drew the schematic on paper, right, and then drew the netlist out in on paper. And then so I've made sure it's all good and stuff. And then I made that into a text editor, and then imported the netlist that made my rat nest on my board, and then I could route it out. It was 100%. Free. Don't look at me.
Yeah. Sometimes free isn't worth what you pay for it.
I mean, I didn't have any money. So yeah.
And you learned a lot in the process. Yeah, sometimes having not the perfect tool helps you really learn what those tools are doing for you.
Exactly. And then I picked up Eagle. Right after that. My a couple years later, I made the pick of ego because it was like a more of an old school style CAD versus all the other programs. And that lended me to like, Oh, I know, Autodesk 2000. It has the same kind of, you know, right click driven interface and has a command line. So you can type stuff in. Like, I want to draw this line from this point to this point, with this thickness. And you can actually type that stuff in.
When you're doing drafting type stuff. It's nice to be able to do that because you want to know you want to be able to type in an exact number of how far you want to move something up or down or
what yeah, the actually like when I was routing the, the connector for the Raspberry Pi, I actually just wrote a little script that I ran that dropped all the vias for my ground pins. And so all I had to do was just click once on each area. Now I was able to route the old like 118 pins in one go.
So that's a lot of pins for one go. Yeah.
It's amazing what you can do if you just know a little bit of scripting, very dangerous. Like I've been learning Python, that's and
you have been dangerous but useful, useful. You've been doing a lot of really useful data research for useful
data data. Yes. Okay. See, I've got the Ziad going back to the other thing, which was, you know, I just picked it up. I think that's, it's probably not the best way to do that. It's only like if you really, really motivated during that way. Chris gamble has got a really good series called contextual like, Oh, yeah. Where he basically you walk through and design boards and KiCad. And I've, I actually looked at it before to see if it would be, you know, should I recommend this to people? And yeah, it's really good. So
cool. So if I wanted to learn how to route boards, like a pro, that's where I'd want to start. Yep. Core pro enough. Pro enough. Yeah. Pro ish, pro ish.
So yeah, the, it's almost, I won't say it's almost done, the netlist is done, which is, as long as I route
it correctly, it will work, right, because you'll know everything's connected where it needs to
exactly. So I spent a lot of time basically combing over the, the schematic because schematics got like, oh, at this point, six years of hacks and mods, and, you know, changes of just my style changes, as I've, you know, gotten better at routing boards. And I looked at it, and I'm like, I could go back and change all this. But it would take a long time, or just ignore it. And I'm just going to leave it until the next thing, we have
the same thing happen in software, where you've got a program that started off nice and clean and shiny and simple. And, oh, we need to add this edge case or that edge case. And by the, you know, like after years, you're you've got this great big, hairy, messy ball of spaghetti. And you're like, wow, I could do this from scratch, I do it so much better.
That's how I'm feeling. But I'm like, that's like, two weeks of afternoons fixing? And I'm like, No, I'm not gonna do that.
So get this one out. And then you can start fresh on a nice shiny one with the next ref. Exactly. The What's that one called? The Avatar, the Penetang.
That's when after this, this is end of the line. So Penetang is actually we've been doing some work on that board to basically, look, you're doing research on like, what FETs we're going to use because we're gonna go more surface mount one, get rid of all the transits.
Oh, that'll be so much easier for manufacture. Oh, yeah.
We'll probably cut like 60 bucks, just an assembly cost? I'll bet. I'll bet. So yeah, we're gonna go surface mount parts for those, we'll probably get rid of the light matrix. So instead of hat that's like, you know, a fifth of the board, real estate will free up. Because of that, we're going to get rid of anything that runs off five volts will go away. And we'll probably do a because that gets, we'll be able to get rid of another internal plane. And we'll be able to compress the design from the sixth layer to a four layer board.
That'll make it a little more affordable as well.
Yeah, mainly in lower volume and higher volume doesn't really matter. Not as much, right? Because it's still going to be if we compress it to a two layer, there'd be a lot of cost savings. But we actually I think Rive five was a two layer board and we just had so much like ground loop stability problems that were just like, we gotta go. We gotta have you need that downed plane in the middle. Yeah, especially with a board that big. I mean, this thing's 14 inches by six things huge. Yeah.
Needs to be penalized all by itself.
Yeah. Well, I think it hits the line item number. Yeah, too. It's like, what 16 line items like that a lot. Yeah, that's another thing is on the next, the pennant tours wanted to crunch the line item number down and get rid of some of the barges of like how the the the GI which is general illumination works with the cabinet IO, they are the cannon i o uses seven four HC one six fives which are parallel in the serial out. And then the general illumination uses 59574 HC 595, which is serial in parallel out. And their protocols are really close to how they work clock latch and data. And so we actually use the same clock and latch information. But the latches have to be inverted. Okay, between them. And so we have a binary inverter on the board. It's like, I was looking at that on on Friday night. And I'm like, why do we actually do
that? So now so it was one standard part for both. You don't need that. Yeah. Translator
or you just make them separate buses. So or I was actually thinking about just using spy busted a spy device. And then that way I could just have an address that we just call and it's whatever which one and that way we can actually add keep adding more if we need more down the road. Like actually put like a header and then we can plug in oh, we need 16 more inputs for cabinet IO for some just another address. Yeah, we just have another address, so it'd be nice and nice and slick that way. There's a lot of little things to do in the pennant or version that's real it's a lot of it's like quality of life increases
right make your improve Parker sanity.
But ending the line is basically what we'll call it and the line because it's the end of this iteration of the pin hack and anything else after it's gonna be complete wipe start over. Yeah, because a lot of actually looking at like the pic how I designed a pic 32 I look at it. I'm like, I really want to change that. Because I don't like how it looks.
Well, sometimes you good design often looks good. Yes. usually does.
Yeah. Well, it turns that one. That screw in your brain
just right. This one's done, right? Yeah.
There's gotta be a name for that.
I haven't a clue what it would be though. Yeah, this
guy be like some Latins, probably German or German. Yeah.
They were engineers.
Okay, so we'll go on to the RFO. And we've got two topics this week. We have the Tesla semi truck. I guess we can talk about the new Roadster two. Yeah, well,
the the they unveiled the Roadster from the truck, didn't they? Oh, I haven't seen the video yet. But I I read somewhere that they did a, like a Steve Jobs type moment. At the end. They showed the truck and they were talking about how awesome the truck is, which the truck is pretty awesome. Let's let's just have you seen the pictures of it? Yes. In some of the pictures. Yeah, they're pretty cool. And I think it's just great from a environmental and economic standpoint. You know, we spend so much right now on fossil fuels moving stuff around on the roads and being able to do that through electric you know, with electric motors. This is junk people just throw away eventually. Right? Yeah. trucks full of Amazon boxes. Yes.
Actually, what percentage and weight is packaging?
Oh, well, they've worked very hard in the packaging world. I'm sure it's extremely light. Like you've got the bags now.
Oh, he said peanuts in bubble wrap. And I guess that used to use like crushed paper.
Yeah. So now you're just shipping around mostly air. But that volume? Yeah, but not wait. Yeah. So. So yeah, the truck looks pretty cool. And then they did at the very end, they said Oh, and there's one more thing they pulled the Roadster out of the out of the truck. And the I forget some of the stats on the Roadster. But like, it's just insane. from a performance standpoint, it's like zero to 60 in 1.9 seconds. Yeah, something like that. Something just silly. Yeah. So but
the truck, it's got a fully charged, they don't have a lot of statistics about this thing yet. Which is kind of normal, I guess, for big tech, and reveals and stuff of this nature. But it's got a 500 mile range, which is it's flexible. It's double my jeep. Sure.
Well, your your Jeep gets like two miles to the gallon after you've added to 12. Okay, sorry, sorry, I exaggerated.
And then it has a with the current technology that Tesla current uses, it can get about 80% of its charge in 30 minutes, which gives it about 400 more miles.
Yeah, that's impressive, because all they have to do is, you know, top it off when they're stopping to get something to eat, or well, actually, when they're loading or unloading stuff.
I was actually reading up about this and what makes us great in that regard is truck drivers have a federally mandated 30 minute break. Oh, there you go. Like lunch or whatever. And that's, that's it right there. And so you can go 900 miles a day. And then that's about all driver can do anyways. Right? I was thinking about that. And I'm like, Alright, a roadster can do that. Because you're 240 outlet at 50 amps on your wall can pump that power out. You're gonna need substations. Now these are these truckstops to do this. We have like 18 trucks pull up in the Nita Yeah,
that's some serious power. Oh, yeah,
I want I want to run some numbers on like, how much actual kilowatts This is using. So we'll write this out for a future date is like how many kilowatts are in these batteries? And then in 30 minutes, how much are you transferring out that socket?
And these are these substations need to be run by the same people that are running these the truckstops today? Yeah, it's a little scary. Yeah. Little little nuclear reactors. each of the different
Cuz you gotta think like, normal truckstop probably doesn't actually pull that much power.
Yeah, some lights and pumps for the gas. Yeah.
And then all it is, is that you know, another truck with gas or right so shows up and fills it up.
Maybe we need new trucks that are driving around there to scrape big batteries on the back.
Oh, delivering batteries. Maybe it depends if this this battery tech is removable or not, it's probably looking at Tesla's that's not a serviceable part, you have to take it to a dealer. But yeah, they got some stats on like 100 mile route. The Tesla semi truck only cost $1.26 versus dollar 51 for a diesel truck. So it's cheaper in that regards in terms of operating costs,
once it makes sense. In dollars. Yeah, it'll happen fast, because there's so much capital expenditures out there. Well,
it's not just the dollar count, though. $1 amount is that it needs to be? Well, I've been finding out especially here in Texas, because we don't really have like, we don't have Tesla dealerships because of reasons in Austin, Texas. But like getting your Tesla service is actually kind of a pain in the butt in Texas. So if you don't have a you like you have to go to like an authorized dealer to get financed. Right. And I have one of my friends has a Tesla, and he has to take that thing in like every month to get stuff fix. Yeah. So that's not good. So it's like, they already have like these quality control issues. And now they're expanding to basically industrial fleet vehicles. And so they have to, I think they have to step up their production quality. And then how are you going to, like, if you just go down the road here, there's like four places you can get, if you had a semi truck, you can get serviced. You know, they're gonna have to implement that basically, all over the nation where these trucks moving going,
Well imagine a lot of it will be will still be standard truck stuff, like your suspensions and some of the air brakes, things like that. So that probably you can get served anywhere. Yeah, but anything drive train related. You're gonna need the special Tesla magic at Tesla guy. Yeah.
Maybe they just send out like, a Tesla certified guide to each of these locations instead of coming up with their own.
Yeah, I mean, the good thing is you have these truckstops Yep. You send them there. Yeah. So you've you've probably got some good places. Yeah. That, that you can put these things. And then
you could also because what you were talking about, you know, the people who run the stations at the remote run the the substations are what are how are they powered them up. But they can have that guy do the same thing. He can just maintain that system there.
He's running the nuclear reactor, and then he comes over and wrenches on your Tesla, Tesla. He's done.
So yeah, we'll see how much it costs. I have actually never looked to see how much my truck costs.
They are expensive out in the match is basically a mortgage if you wanted to get into
I think that's what most people do. They sell their house and yep, go into trucking. Mm. So
my cousin's oldest, is a truck driver. Does the long haul stuff.
That sounds glamorous.
It's a different lifestyle. You know, I don't know that it would be for me, but I think it's perfect for him. You know, he it's a it's a good deal for him. But I don't think I could deal with it.
I think it'd be something about you get to see a new city. Well, new until you come through the same route.
Right. And, and you're seeing a lot of the interstates you're not really getting to know the cities. You're assuming that's true. Interstates and truckstops.
Yeah. Well, you get to see a lot of the Midwest. Yeah. Nothing flat flat.
Like Houston, like Houston. Yep.
Okay, so topic two is the Ember light, which was a Kickstarter back to company. Oh, no. And they're shutting down. So what Ember light did was they had IoT enabled. Yeah, he's grimacing already. sockets. So instead of a light bulb, like a hue, none of y'all have who's familiar with that? So that's a light bulb that's got all the gizmos inside of them. So what they did was they put the gizmos inside the light socket. I remember this Yeah. Instead of the light bulb. And so you would have to put new fixtures in but you could use any light bulb you wanted. And pretty good idea. But they're shutting down because they're out of money. Right? And they already everyone that got their stuff. So it's not because of you know, they ran out of money. It's just they said market pressures and all the you know, like Philips in GE are already moving into the space now. So it's like, really hard to, it's hard to compete against heat with the volume scale that you He has right. So yeah, that's their, basically their problem is they're shutting all their services down? Well, when you want to turn on your light bulb, it's got to go talk to their server. No. So all their devices will stop working. So do you
know if there any plans to like release stuff to open source or anything like that? So basically, if you bought one of these things, you store it in your house. So it's not like a light bulb, we can just replace it, you need to get an electrician to come out and most install it, you'd have to get electrician. Oh, yeah, yeah. That's not good.
But it's, it's, it's just, it's this new thing where you don't really, people need to realize on these kinds of devices, you don't own the device, since you're tied to their service.
Right? You own the device, but you don't own the infrastructure that it needs. Correct. So you're you are beholden to whoever it is that you happen to sign up with?
Yeah. And it's like, you know, it's not even like, oh, I'll just buy ones from bigger companies. I mean, look at Blackberry, BlackBerry, was the number one cell phone manufacturer. What, right before the iPhone came out, right from destroyed them. And Android came in and gobbled up the rest of the market share. So like, even these big companies can easily succumb to this kind of problem. But yeah, it's, I was thinking about, like, how would you solve this problem? Like, if you were, if you were the manufacturer, I guess you could open source it. But that then relies on someone being smart enough to figure out how to run your server, right? And start up the service. So even if they open source, like the code, like their server code, probably it would take a while for someone to actually get that working on, let's say, AWS, so that almost anyone could maybe use it like click a button to start up a AWS instance. So there are in those couple of weeks, you don't have lights on,
right. And the challenge is that the devices are looking for a specific host on the internet. And if that host goes away, you're done until you can somehow get control over that domain. Otherwise, I mean, there are things you could do if you're a hacker to spoof it and tell it to Yeah, manage to hack it and get new firmware on there. But I, yeah, it's not good. I, if they were responsible, and I don't, again, I don't know enough about the situation.
But I just know enough to write down the sentences,
it would be really nice if they were to have some sort of exit strategy for people that are left with these devices. Because ideally, what would be nice is you say, okay, look, we're our servers are going to be shut down on such and such date. And here are your options. You know, you can switch to this other service, you can if you want to control it yourself from software in your house, this is what you have to do have the have a procedure written up to do that. I think that would be the the nicest thing you could do for the least you could do for people that have you know, backed yet up to this point. Yeah.
So I was thinking about kinda like more, you know, this is gonna keep happening. Sure. This we actually, I think we covered this like, last year, we had some, like, revolve or something like that went out of business, too, and shut everything down. They were like, the precursor to nest.
So okay, yeah.
I probably I probably messed up that story.
But, but yeah, it would be nice. If when you get these Internet of Things devices, there was some way out that you could, you know, yeah, switch to a different server at will.
Well, it's got to be it's not just that though, because not everyone's gonna be like most people, some people have problems, typing in Wi Fi password, right. So I'm thinking something, it has to be a lease simple enough of just plugging in a box, maybe like a local area,
right or, or an app, you can run on your phone that will somehow find devices to connect to them. As I
was saying it's like a box like a modem. So you plug it in, and then you talk to it with your phone, like you would normally do. And then you can also probably make that box as a bridge to the other style, right? So as long as you can get around the proprietary however they talk so that way that that Ember like can also be used on the same network as the like a huge lightbulb, or
there are there are services out there right now that do that so that you can have a mix of devices all controlled from one central location. And basically they are emulators that act like this or use a hue light so that you can control it through all the normal hue light bulb stuff, but then it just turns around and reformats the commands, and you're actually turning on your TV or your ex code or whatever.
So yeah, something like that. That's just like a, you plug in next to your modem. And it does everything. Yeah, maybe make it like you put the app on your phones, you could configure all the stuff to your phone make it easy.
Yeah, it would be nice. Yeah, someone to
build that it's a million dollar idea. Because then that the person who builds that goes out of business, that thing still works,
right. And if you do it responsibly, you know, make sure there's decent security, which seems to be the weakest link with all of this IoT stuff.
So we were talking with John Adams, who's IoT? Well, he's not IoT security, but he does a lot security stuff. And his solution is, it's only it's as weak as the default configuration because that's what's right. Right. So just make it you know, decent enough to start
without being too much of a barrier to get started. Yes, it's a there's a sweet spot in there somewhere.
I was thinking like, you can just use like a randomly generated password. Mama's typing in randomly generated passwords suck. We actually were making jokes about that earlier today, cuz I like a 16 character.
The the way to memorize your password, yeah, apple, apple, orange.
Yeah. So let me blueberry, I got I took a picture of it just because I'm ridiculous it was. So I'll read out. So it was a randomly generated password. 16 characters long would have had special symbols, awesome stuff in it. And it was like v n s e. So I didn't use this password for anything. So this is not like a super secret password, right? Vi N S, E Up caret, left curly brace f x Mosport. m nine Q, B three left. Left parentheses. percent sign s. And so the remember that was visa nut, Skype, egg up, carrot, left parentheses, fruit, exclamation point music nine Queen best buy three, blah, blah, blah. It's like, we
should make that the title of this episode. Yeah.
Look, I'm actually used this website a lot to generate passwords, because makes pretty good ones. And I'm looking at this thing. I'm like, I couldn't you won't even remember that. Let alone the original 16 characters,
right? Forget about it. Well, we all know how to get into your bank account. Yes. Yeah, that's good.
And so I was thinking like, if you made a password like that, that'd be every pre secure or WPA password. But the problem is, you have to take that thing in which a pain in the butt. Just put a QR code. Yeah, I think in your app would have it built in as a scanner. So you just take that snapshot of it. Because, you know, if someone gets physical access to your device, it's going to be game over game over anyway. So it's like if you just put the password on the box. That's fine. Yeah, that's Yeah. QR codes acceptable to me. Yeah, scan that guy in. And then that's at least better than password as the past Right?
Or no password or password? Yeah. How many? How many Linksys routers out there are out there with the same password that everybody just hold open? Yeah.
I think it's starting to curve a bit because now we have these that when you get a modem from like Comcast has built in Wi Fi so you don't have your own modem anymore, or router. And those passwords are usually fairly robust from the get go
keyed to the serial number. I've seen a lot of them
which is it's not something you can easily guess no. So there's some barrier to entry. You can
guess that you're a really good guesser and should play the lottery.
Yes. Or you just blew your one chance to win the lottery on guessing no Wi Fi password. Your neighbor.
Whoops. I chose poorly. Yeah.
Oh, cool. I think that's gonna wrap up this episode of podcast. Oh, wait, clarity is telling me to say yes. Oh, yes, I was. 100 is coming up soon. This was 95. So in five more episodes, Episode 100 will be here and we are doing a q&a. So submit your questions to Iris. Iris at macro. fab.com. There you go. Or support or in the Slack channel or podcast at macro calm.
And if you ask really nicely, we'll even answer them. Yes. Well,
I'll answer them. Yes, Parker will answer them. So cool. And yeah. And next week is the hardware meetup here in Houston. Yep. It looks like it's gonna be pretty good bunch and we're going to have it's a legal session. I have no idea what they're going to talk about. Besides, a lawyer is going to talk in lawyer stuff, a lawyer stuff fun market, getting your product to market and what legal stuff you have to go through.
That should be actually very interesting because I'm sure there are a ton of regulations and rules that you need to think about that. You know, if you're just in the garage trying to come up with a great idea you're not aware of
I think the biggest one is what happens if your device burns someone's house down? That's a good one. That one's always that's like the one question that always prevented me from like building something and put self on it.
Right? Do what happens if you burn someone's house down or you've completely you know, polluted the the airspace and the surrounding areas so nobody's cell phones work anymore? Oh, yeah. And all that good stuff,
was it? This is off topic but I guess somewhat related when they were testing the first atomic bomb and in Los Los Alamos Yeah. Some some scientists thought when the bomb went off, it would immediately basically chain it burn all the oxygen in the atmosphere or change it in some other way. And like, I guess if you blew the bomb up, it wouldn't matter. Yeah, because everyone's be Yeah,
war would be over nobody won.
Yeah, that's kind of a that's a liability right there. Yeah. You might think of burning someone else down what are you just printing her world down?
Yeah, I don't think insurance is gonna cover that. Yeah.
The insurance policy for the US military 1944. Oh, man. Cool. So that was the Mac fab engineering podcast. We are your hosts Parker Dolan
and Mike Williams. See you later guys.
Bye Thank you. Yes, you our listener for downloading our show. If you have a cool idea, project or topic that you want Steven and I to discuss, tweet us at McWrap or email us at podcast at Mac Fred calm. Also check out our Slack channel. If you're not subscribed to the podcast yet, click that subscribe button. That way you get the latest map episode right when it releases and please review us on iTunes. It helps us show stay visible and helps new listeners find
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