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up now at Patreon dot dot net rocks dot com. Hey Carlin Richard here.
As you may have heard, NDC is back offering their incredible in person
conferences around the world. DC Porto is happening October sixteenth through the twentieth.
Go to dc porto dot com to register and check out the full lineup of
conferences at NDC conferences dot com. Coming at you from the eye of the
storm, Rock Hurricane it is in Yeah, that was Colleen Lavin and Richard
and I are here in Denmark in copenating in an airstream and us understorm,
exactly where you want to be in a thunderstorm. It's just a large metal
box. I'm pretty sure this is a large metal box on rubber tires.
Will this be the last ever episode of Rock Once for All? For roud
by a thunderstick found in a smoldering ruin any card. What's on it?
We better make it worth it before are given it to mis Oh my god,
it's so much fun of robots think she's funny, but I'm pretty sure
I think she's funny. It's pretty funny. Thank you very much. Well,
we'll talk to Colleen in a minute, but first we have a little
housekeeping starting with better no framework. Roll that music? All right, man,
what do you got? Okay? So this was another suggestion by one
of the AX guys. I think it might have even been Brian McKay.
This is Cursor, the AI first code editor. So this is like a
combination of GitHub, Copilot and you know, vs code, but more tightly
integrated. And it's at Cursor dot s O. And I'm just going to
read some of the comments that they posted here. Started using cursory yesterday and
I'm blown away. It's how copilot should feel. I'm completely off vs code
now, great work, you guys. Two concrete examples. One, it
generated a new view set for me using the correct schema of my Django models
that were mentioned in a completely different file. That's interesting too. I asked
it a time zone question about a cron tab and it generated the answer in
context in the correct place in my Celery Beats schedule. I love things like
this because it feels like I'm reading science switching again in a completely different file,
and there's about one hundred files in the whole project. It's awesome.
So yeah, this is just one of the one of the things people are
People are going nuts about this, I guess. And you can download it
for Windows at Cursor dot s. There might be a Mac version too.
I'm not sure. That's awesome. So who's talking to us today? Richard
grabbed a Commatopper Show sixteen oh five. That's the one we did back in
twenty eighteen. So it's been a while about IoT and edge computing. Jared
Rose and that was we actually recorded that one in Prague at the Update conference
in fact of the day, and this comments from Topper King he's been a
regularistur for a long time. Hey, Chopper, hope ahead. Yeah,
I'm pretty sure you already got to be used to go by, but don't
hold that against us. Chopper said, you guys did a good job discuffing
the creep and uncanny Valley aspects of IoT and sensor gathering too much data about
individuals but one of the exciting things about good edge computing is that it can
be used to overcome these issues. Pushing compute the edge you can allow you
to get value from data well then ever transmitting it or saving it outside the
environment it lives in. I had a fascinating discussion with a theme park technologist
about doing sentiment anounces some people's facial expressions. They were rightfully concerned about people
being creeked out that their mood was being tracked by the entire theme park.
Yeah, but I suggested that if they never sent a frame of video or
identifiable information, but deployed devices with cameras it only sent alerts when an edge
device attected high unhappiness in a ride line, then they would preserve people's sense
of privacy while still getting us giving a portion of the data they actually cared
about. This is important implications for designs of all sorts for connected devices.
I do want my fridge to tell me when I'm low on milk, but
I don't want it to send pictures or even summary data of the contents of
my fridge to general electric I don't care about my fridge telling me when I'm
low on milk. The fact, you've heard me rant against that for many
Why does my fridge need Wi Fi? I'm sorry, no, it should
not. I fully agree with this, by the way, But you know
what bugs me even more? WiFi connected in microwave. Oh yes, come
on, I'm putting something in the microwave for sixty seconds on average. I
do not need to control it from my phone. I don't care if that
makes me a lot of I'm gonna be like my father and stand in front
of me. Go come on, you just leave the door open. Then
the WiFi seagles an't gonna be hurt anyway. Yeah, put your phone in
there, you go. Yeah, microw have your phone. Let me let
me finish stopper here. If you can deploy machine learning smarts all the way
to the machine and keep them updated there, then device manufacturers can provide value
in a much more respectful manner. Is already being supported a very cool manner
by ours your cognitive services running inside locally hosted containers. I hope that both
the marketing regulars drive IoT in this direction. What I love about this is
it's five years old. Yes, like Chopper nailed it, nailed it five
years ago. This is exactly director, you're moving in with machine learning models
to the edge and that sort of thing. I just don't know how much
people think about primacing this context. I think most people see a camera and
presume you're misusing that data. So you have two problems. You have the
privacy problem, where you know companies are legally bound to disclose what they're using
for you. You would hope, hey, we hope. You also have
the problem of understanding on the part of the consumer. They may not understand
that it's for their own benefit and they may thank big brothers watching blah blah
blah. I don't like that. And then on top of that, if
you do say, hey, we're taking pictures you, we're gathering telemetry for
your benefit, then a smart user will be able to game it. Yep.
Yeah, so it's look pissed off, Yeah exactly, Look look look
pissed off. And then somebody's going to come over and offer you a hot
lotze. Yeah. Something. It's very interesting anyway, Greek Greek conversation starter
there, topper, and thanks so much for listening to the show and contributing
as always, and a copy of us to Code buy is honest. Way
to you, actually, I suspect you already have one if you'd like a
copy of used to Code I read a comment on the website at dot net
rocks dot com or on the facebooks we published every show there, and if
you comment there at ever ready on the show, we'll send you a copy
of music code by And you should definitely follow us on Twitter or x or
whatever the hell they're calling it these days. But I'm also on Mastodon,
and as of yesterday, Richard, I'm on blue Ston Welcome to the Blue
Sky class. So I'm also on LinkedIn and stuff, and I just figured
I'm just gonna send people at Carl Franklin dot com because all of my social
media links are there. Yeah, but what's your Mastodon? Mastodon is rich
Campbell at mastodon dot social. My Blue Sky is rich Campbell as well.
My Threads is rich candul and your Twitter slash x is at rich Campbell as
well. So do you rest to grab one name? Right? So you
might want to have like a do what I do, like make a Richard
Campbell dot c a website and put them all there. Yeah, kind of
about me somewhere with a bunch of that stuff. You should probably clean that
up you know, well, there's nothing like the digital effluent that scatters across
the Internet, and then when it goes down people remind you too. Yeah,
hey, your your static website is down? Did you not pay your
bill? Well, anyway, let's introduce Colleen for sure. Colleen l is
the lead developer Advocated Particle with the background and software development and product management.
She's worked with NASA Cool, We're in Royalty here in the Presence of Royalty,
and was featured on Gimlet Media's startup podcast Great Great Podcast. When she's
not playing with robots more on that later or coding, you can usually find
her lost in the woods or on Twitter at Colleen Codes. Welcome. Hello,
thank you very much for having me today. What do you like this?
You like this rustic kind of podcast environment here? You know, I
know it'll be audited out later, but I find the sound of the rain
very calming. Yeah, okay, yeah, it's it is kind of epic.
And look at this whole airstream trailer sort of approach of recording shows is
like style over substance, Like it's very cool. Yeah, but it is
a metal box not your ideal recording environment or we're going to try our best
to remove the white noise from the background, but every once in a while
you might hear some thunder or some an increase in some white noise or whatever,
or maybe the large static verse of us being electrocuted by a lightning bolt.
Only the audience is really lucky. We're not. I'm taking my hands
off my computer right now. I've got my feet off the medical metal ground.
So do the Robots think You're funny? Is? What is that all
about? Do the robots think You're funny? So? I just wrapped up
a few days ago, actually a full run at the end Refringe, with
a comedy show entitled Do the Robots Think I'm Funny? It's a show where
I wrote a program and on stage had a robot with me that listened for
the sound of the audience laughter and kept what I like to call the laugh
score throughout and so whenever, so the program would check in every so often,
and when the last score wasn't where he wanted it to be. And
I don't know why I called the robotic, but his name is murder Bots,
so statistically I felt like it was probably so whenever he didn't think that
I was as funny as I should have been at that point in the show.
He would heckle me on stage, and then at the end I would
run an analysis and murder Boat would say whether or not I was funny that
day. But then, and here's the part that I liked a lot.
Then, no matter what, the audience would get to vote whether or not
they gave a hoot what murder Bot said, oh so, and whether or
not it matched up. What was the result the results overall, well,
there were like twenty two shows of it, so the result changed a lot.
I also, I would say the first week it wasn't as accurate it
was as it was later on, because especially the first couple of days,
I had to retrain it with new data. I recorded every show on my
phone and then would add that at every night. Well, okay, I
skipped one or two nights, but I would overall add it to the models
so it would become more and more accurate. Okay, And overall I was
fairly lucky. The robot did things that I was funny a lot of the
time. But more importantly, the whenever the robot said I wasn't funny,
the audience would start booing it. I almost liked it more when the robot
disliked me because the level of solidarity I felt with the audience in that moment
absolutely, And you know you can both, you know, use the robot
as the scapecoat, right, Oh yeah, yeah, it's not hey,
it's not me. That's not funny. You know, don't boo me boo
the robot. Oh so that, Oh yeah, I forgot about that.
So this was actually an audience suggestion. A lovely audience member pulled me aside
and gave me the suggestion that I added in. So whenever the robot heckled
me, the audience was allowed to boo, and if they booed the robot,
that got added in to my last score as a positive because they liked
me. And that was a little like a little less accurate, because I
will say the problem with that is when a lot of people say the word
boo at once, it doesn't necessarily always sound like the word boo because you
have one person starting and then the other and it's a lot harder with the
inflections to do boo versus boo. Yeah. True. Yeah. So was
this an anthropomorphic robot? Did it look human or was it just a box
so or somewhere in between a little bit in between. I can share pictures
with you, guys. I can send you a picture of him murder Bot.
Yeah, so his original name had been Gorge from the Days, Such
a good movie. But I kept on wanting to murder him, so I
called a murder bot. So wait, you called him? So whether it's
a heat or she or an it is or they is completely up in the
air. I mean gore is all was also referred to as a heat.
Well that's true. Yeah, yeah, okay, I felt that I'm telling
the robot it. I don't know why. Something in my brain was like,
if I'm sharing a stage with this creature, we have I have to
add some sort of professional level of respect that I'm programmed to hate me.
Oh so, how do we jump into IoT from from such the best IoT
story I've ever heard? It is? I mean, everything's going to go
downhill and boring from here. So you do, I mean you have a
quote I'm air quoting here, real job I do. Particle was very lucky
to let me work, or very nice. I was very lucky they let
me work from Scotland and take a little time off to do the fringe.
But Also, it's a whole month long. I wasn't taking a whole month,
but can you imagine the amount of emails I would have to catch on
at the end of the month. It's the end of the world. You
have to clear email bankruptcy at that so you have to fake your own death
at that point. But yes, I run the DevRel program at Particle,
it's a wonderful company. We do connected micro controller boards. Basically, what
that means is you got a hardware board that you can immediately connect to the
cell signal or Wi Fi, depending on what model you got. I recalled
Particle is Photon. Isn't that the product that was the first ever board?
Actually mean, well, no, here's the thing, the Photon too.
It's funny because this is the first time they've ever had a Photon or we've
ever had a Photon two or anything with a two. But so you saw
hardware, So I'm looking at the Photon, the Photon two, monitor one
tracker one Wi Fi devices, cellular devices, and and then you obviously have
developers because you're developer relations. So how do we program these things? Then?
Are they different from any other dot net kind of platform that we would
program yeah, so I would say the the big thing is you program them
primarily in a C C plus plus sort of language. Officially the frameworks called
wiring, but anyone who's used in our DW know before we'll recognize it.
Okay, it's the way you program it is very similar to programming our DW
knows. But you can also program it from We have a couple of ideas
that you can use. There's the web based one and there's also my favorite,
which is Particle Workbench, our Visual Studio code extension. Nice work in
studio with an extension loaded in, and if you go, that's pretty much.
You plug in. I might actually have one in my backpack, but
you just plug it in, set it up, and go. Very easy
setup experience. I'm actually really proud of how we read into the setup experience
recently. You just go to setup dot Particle dot io and plug in your
device. Everything gets set up really quickly, which doesn't sound like a big
deal. My favorite thing about particle devices and our general goal is making it
so things just work. Yes, so you don't have to install a million
drivers. You don't the Battle of the Arduino. It's like, just plug
into my qusp port please please. Oh yeah, and I love ourd ween
devices too. But it's a battle. It can be a battle, especially
if you're trying to do a Wi Fi connected device or and is typically what
you do is connect just my WiFi, not plug it in. We do
plug in my USB because it's a lot I have found that the setup process
when you do that, it's a lot faster, a lot easier. Yeah,
like, and we do have alternate means and setup, but I fully
recommend just plug in, run the setup tool, and go because it's a
lot faster. And web USB is just such a wonderful. It's interestingly how
much better it's gotten from the old days of trying to do serial you are
connections And so how does the rest API come into play here? Can we
use any kind of client to program the device? Yeah, HP rest,
Yeah you can, that's essentially yeah. Yeah, I don't have a very
long answer for that. But so I'm bringing back to the language, right,
if you want to write directly on the device, it's like a CC
plus plus some hybradors, right, But you can program with the ABI in
any language. Yeah, yeah, well maybe not fortun any language that works
with a yeah, yeah, I guess if you really want it. So
the programs that you're writing going to go on the device or are they?
Are you manipulating it? How? Like? How does the programming work?
So that highly dependence on what you're doing. So you will almost certainly be
writing some firmware, right, But a lot of what a lot of people
like to do is write some firmware, flash it to the device, and
have that mostly communicate with stuff that goes on outside of the device. Yeah.
Like I'm a big compundent of using webhooks to do everything I can.
Yeah. Sure, So while you would be pushing that to it communicating with
let's say, I don't know, I just always use IoT devices to control
my LIFs because that is the The blinking LED is a definitive Hello World.
It is, you've got it. I always like blinking the LED in the
Morse code for Hello World. That's legit. I remember getting a basic You
were talking about basic stamp. This is years of years ago, twenty years
ago maybe, and I said, what's that and you said, oh,
I'm sorry, you're about to go down a rabbit. I bought a thing
to you know. It was like one of the first little device programmers,
and you're right, they go down the rabbit hole and you have to apologize
for it. You apologize, have stolen hundreds of hours of your life just
by saying these words, if the simultaneous a apology and a you're welcome,
welcome to a new obsession because you didn't have enough. Oh yeah, why
buy an iote device when you can make wise? I haven't burned my fingers
enough lately. Always the problem with these products and the inevitably like once you
get past the blinking ladies, like what am I doing here? What do
I need this for? Don't you need it for? And that's the problem.
It's like it's almost too much like you almost you don't have enough lines
around it. Like what did I do with the basic stamp back in the
day. I wired it to a hydraulic actuator on my server closet because as
a server closet and b the air conditioner would fail. Yeah, you have
to put a button pusher on it, right, so the air when the
when the temperature would get above eighty fahrenheit, you know, thirty twenty seven
degrees centigrade, that that little gizmo would just activate and push those doors open,
right, and and the basic stamp for a couple of bucks was enough
logic to be able to set those rules and then send a notice sake yeah
over temperature, keep the keep the machines from melting down. One of the
first IoT device projects that the after the next guys and I did when we
got together was a phartometer on base on a Raspberry Pi with a methane detector.
Oh no, And you basically would just put it on a table and
would detect the smell of mething before anybody's nose. But the window. Yeah,
we thought that was just great. I think you weren't wearing in the
right place. Don't bring nothing to a harm there you go. Yeah,
but always going on. But you know, at least Richard's example was practical.
I had thought of, like when you set a hydraulic actuator. I
thought of something that I could stick with velcro over the coffee maker button,
right, and so I could actually turn on my coffee maker and start the
coffee process when I woke up in the morning, so by the time about
the shower, I don't have to go downstairs turning on to back up.
And you don'tn't use your times. You never know when you're waking up.
Don't never know when you're waking up exactly. Well, that's actually something like
that is one of the common gateway projects that I like to call to make
it like meth le different. Yes, the common the common gateway drug math
start with then move on to the hard stuff like CBD. I like you
you can stay here. I just find it good. I was worried.
Please don't kick me off to the rain. Oh, there are really common
gate gateway projects though, like my one of my favorites that I see over
and over again, and it's my favorite because of how surprising it is.
But when you think about it, it's not too surprising. One thing that
tends one of the most common things that will get people into making hardware is
getting chickens, right deal. It's a huge deal. Chicken based projects are
huge coop monitoring light projects because apparently and I do not have chickens, by
the way, but I've learned a lot about chickens by reading these chicken projects
and figuring out why they need to exist. Like apparently chickens lace you are
eggs in the winter, And part of that is due to their sun exposure
and temperature exposure. So one really cool project I've seen is controlling heat lamps
in the chicken coop by checking local weather data and adjusting for a daily or
coop monitorings. Another big one open and closing the gates so when they when
they allowed out in the yard when, and you know, sort of safety
around all of that. So certainly temperature monitory things like that. There was
the one of the top twitch channels way in the beginning was a chicken coop
where you could spend twenty five cents feed the chickens. Yea, we had
a little automation to drop a little feed out right. That's great. How
fun is that? So one of the another one of our projects that have
been max This is a real company that we did some work for and Scott
Ratley did the work actually made was for this company that had lab mice and
in experiments and stuff, and they had warehouse with all sorts of lab nice
and they wanted to detect when there was something going on with a nice.
So they had all sorts of sensors like ammonias sensors and other other things that
they could detect chemicals that they could detect in the air that would say,
oh, there's something wrong with nice two hundred and thirty two hundred and thirty
four. We can go and look at them and see if they need to
you know, they've expired or they you know, they're sick or something like
that. Eating each other. Yeah, that is an application. I haven't
bought them. And I grew up around lab mice. Okay, Yeah,
I spent a lot of a weird amount of my childhood, which I suppose
it's any amount of my childhood hanging out at a pharmaceutical testing lab. You
know, you do no any day I didn't have They let me hang out
there. I would like to point out that nobody in my family worked there.
My soccer coach did, and she thought it was fun having me there.
Her kids also hung out. There's a place to hang out. Yeah,
we had a we had a club in a storage and a lot.
But yeah, lab mice. Yeah, it's Euthanasian day. Let's go.
We weren't allowed in the killing room. That's bring your children to a place.
It has a killing room. There was you know, it was the
strangest, most wonderful place because it wasn't just a pharmaceutical testing lab. Because
the dad, my friend Dabby's dad, he also was a carpenter and he
had his carpentery workshop there, and there was a vegetable garden up front and
a little playground in the courtyard shop and you can just never go home.
This this is the ideal daycare. It's like, I have sharp tools and
rodents, what more do you need? I asked my mom about this recently
in hindsight as an adult. I asked her about it because I mentioned this
in my comedy show and my parents came to see it once, So that
meant that I got to interrogate them in front of an audience, because people
like that's if you see that story on stage at a comedy show, you
will question it. Oh yeah, because does not seem real. It does
not seem real. So I asked my mom and her answer was, who
am I to turn down free childcare? Yeah, it's like some of us
Sesame Street. You liked it there, right, you were learning things.
They have a lot of bookcases with classic novels because the the lady who ran
the ran the labrad her kids grew up there. So there were shelves of
board games and books and if you could make a really great sport in a
conference table. Yeah, nice is everything you need. And I'm going to
interrupt for one moment, this very important message and we're back. Okay.
Well that's Carl Franklin with our friend Colleen Livin and laughing our butts off.
The rain has subsided none of us been a good day. It's a good
day. And I wanted to ask you about some of these other devices like
Monitor one of field ready and customizable gateway for monitoring industrial equipment. What makes
this is a more specialized in terms of the sensors you can put on it
than folt Onto. So not necessarily you can technically put a lot of the
same sensors on here. But the difference from Monitor one is we noticed that
a lot of companies were making basically the same thing and it wasn't part of
their product. They weren't selling it or anything. What they were doing was
making this sort of monitoring system because that's what you need. That's what they
needed, So we figured why not make their lives a little bit easier.
Waterproofing is a pain in the butt, Like I've done a bunch myself right
having to buy the bulkheads and an IP sixty seven seal, and like it's
a nuisance to make a proper protective case. It's such a pain you have,
like you have to usually redo it three or four times. And I
will say there are some great templates on the particle community because people have done
something like this over and over. But if you don't want to do it
over and over, and you just want something that works right out of the
box, does what you need to and it's also customizable for your specific needs.
Those subtle things like is this not got enough heat dispersion in it?
Like put this board in here running it at full more twenty four hours a
day. Is it too hot? And monitoring is one thing that we see
people do with our devices over and over again. Like I know, I'm
not supposed to have favorite customers, However I have some favorites. One of
my favorites is this guy out of Wisconsin, Jeff, who uses particle devices
to monitor maple syrup tanks which are called by the way, which are called
sugar bushes. And if any other particle customers are upset that they were not
listed as one of my favorites, Jeff sent me maple syrups. So what
I mean, what would you monitor in his syrup tank? Capture, temperature
of humidity, yes, leak detections another another thing like for him. One
one of the reasons he started his company was he is a Maple syrups and
so he had a Maple Syrup pank but it was about I think a forty
five minute drive from his house, and so he had to drive there pretty
much daily to check up on that. Remote monitoring is this is a huge
part of this equation and it's not this I want stuff monitored, he said,
I'm nowhere near it when it's being one. Yeah, nowhere near like
Field and Field kids in particular, getting something that will survive the weather.
Yeah, oh man. One of another customer who I very much like a
company, Oh yeah. The first company, by the way, was called
Maple IoT. Shout out to them and their SAP spy. But another customer
who's really done a lot of great open source work on casing is this guy
Chip, who runs a company called c Insights. And yes, Charles McClelland,
but he goes by Chip. He is genuinely a delight. So I
realized whenever you say the phrase genuinely a delight. It sounds sarcastic, but
it really isn't. He's wonderful, but he's run into an issue. So
his company makes park monitoring systems so national and state parks can know their user
data because you don't necessarily have a check in at the state park, and
it's good to know like who's going on what trail, stuff like that.
However, those devices are living outside forever. Yeah, he has had devices
that have actually gotten struck by lightning before. I think he generally not survivable,
like just smoking bits when you were doing you find them. He did
say that it was still intact, but you chose not to continue using it.
On my first album, I programmed the drum tracks myself, so we
gave Chip Franklin album credit, and you know it was Franklin brother, Chip
Franklin Frums. I do very much like the idea of a hardware guy named
Chip. Yeah, that's great. It's kind of kind of the rule.
All right. So here's a question we've when we talked about IoT in the
past, and admittedly we haven't in a long time, because there was a
time when it was a craze and and then it kind of died down.
But yeah, but did it? But well it did? It did for
us in our on our show, that's all I'm saying. Oh yeah,
but I remember talking to guys that say, well, you want to prototype
with something that's easy take sensors on and off. But if you're going to
do production, you want to get the board's main facture. Yes, And
so you, guys, I see, have an option for that. So
you prototype with boats on two and then you have this thing called the P
two. So what's guess that basically is the board that we would recommend for
production. You'd get that made in or attached to a PCB and it it
isn't something that you would need to use a bread board for for instance.
Like it's more akin to if you open up any any piece of technology,
it looks more like that. Yeah, but the code is all burned in.
It's all more secure than a prototyping board, right I would actually so,
yes, and no so particle in particular, our boards all have extremely
good security, so you could because look, I think it's very important to
have security for home projects as well, because a lot of our hobby board
projects are used to control people's homes. Right, You don't want that to
be easily hacked. Are the particle device? iOS automatically has built in security.
A lot of the tools for security are more often used in a production
environment, but they are very secure devices overall. So why would you want
to get a board manufactured for you know, for retail, let's say,
rather than having something that you can you know you have to make piecemeal or
whatever. Oh well, because if you're in a production environment, it's a
lot easier. It's a lot it's more compact. You can mass produce them.
You can mass produce it. Question is how many? At what point
does it make more since have the manufactured product, Like if I only need
two of these things, then maybe staying on the prototype system, a little
bit of hardwiring instead of breadboard. But it's it's got to be I'm just
wanting to a thresher. It was like, if he doesn't just haven't made,
I would actually go a little higher than that. So it also depends
on your purpose sure, Like for instance, there are some people like educators.
I'm never going to tell an educator to move to a P two over
a photon too, because this is great for a learning environment. But if
you're if you have already tested out your prototype and you're wanting to start manufacturing
at scale. Yeah, I think when you make your first order of let's
say, one hundred devices, that's around the time you should start thinking about
moving to a P two, moving to massacred number. This is enough that
it's like, this is just a lot, right, Like think that will
have a lot so, but you should also have now refined your design enough
that making it more compact, Like does it take a few iterations to actually
get to a P two product you're happy with? Or is it going to
be right the first time? Oh? I don't think anything's right the first
time, and I would not. Why are you disabusing my illusions? Okay,
that is a classic programmer fallacy. You know what I have found the
most the programmer who is daydreaming about a project is the most optimistic person in
the world. Nobody's happier about building hardware than someone who's never built one bare
yeah, or somebody who has built on something in the past and now has
selective amnesia. Yeah, that time. But you know why I find this
time it's gonna be wonderful. We're going to have the best time ever.
Most of the folks that had known who've had to build hardware like this end
up moving to Hong Kong and going to Shenzen every day for three months to
get to a product. They're happy, yeah, at least and consider it
a win. When Particles started out, actually it was part of a hardware
accelerator. I believe in sin and this is way before I joined Particle,
but that is essentially what they were doing every day. I think I ran
into them. Why I knew the name off the top of my head was
like, no, I worked with this at one time, and I used
to do gigs in Hong Kong and went to Shenzen and saw the insanity that
was at place. I don't know what it's like today. I don't know
that i'd go today. But it just was a realization that the physical,
the physical construction of these things is way harder than your thing. There's so
many little problems that crop up, and that's why Particle exists to make that
a lot easier. Because a lot of the times when you're building, whether
you're building an at home project or you're building something to scale, there are
things that you don't think of that just start to go wrong, and so
Particles our job is to make that a lot easier. So you can go
from hey, I want to build this thing to oh, I just built
its. Like when I used to be really into hackathons, back before I
needed sleep to function, and my secret weapon at the time was actually a
particle photon, right, because if you had a particle photon, you didn't
have to worry about getting everything put together, getting all of the little features
set up, because you already had a device that could connect. Within twenty
minutes of setting it up, you could have something. We have these things
at Particle, like Particle publish and Particle subscribe, where you could make an
event and just listen to that event. And so in like five lines of
code, you've got basic monitoring. John, Right, you're grabbing data off
of a off of a sensor and being able to direct it somewhere. And
that's extremely useful for prototyping getting something out the door really fast. But it's
also something that scales very well. Right now, is this right? I'm
looking at the photon two? Is it really nine dollars for this month only?
Actually usually it's nineteen. It is on sale for the month. Wow,
And to be clear, we're recording on August thirty first. When you
hear this, it is an August thirty first anymore. So if people reach
out to me, I might have a couple of coupon codes for that on
Twitter at machine codes. But you aren't talking. That's not including sensors obviously,
right, Yeah, no, but you could get some sensors pretty cheap.
Yeah, the sensors on the expensive part the device in general is for
the Photon two. We specifically wanted to make an affordable device that gets people
excited about building stuff, right, And here's an edge mL kit machine learning
yes two for sixty bucks. Yes, So we partnered up with edge Impulse
Machine Learning to build a kit that uses the edge Impulse particle library basically makes
it so your Photon two can run classifications and stuff on it. Because the
Photon two and my memory is a little shot today, but so I'm not
going to quote exact numbers, but the Photon two has amazing memory. It
has this very powerful capability, so you can actually run this AI software on
it. So, for instance, one of my favorite we have, We've
got a couple example projects, and one that I find very delightful is a
project called more Muted where you can This by the way, only works if
you put it on your own device device, because we're not going to have
other people controlling them. Wrong. Yeah, but it listens for the term
you're muted to be sad. If it is sad, then it automatically on
mute to you. If you are muted, it does nothing if you're not
muted. Yeah, that's the classic you know, COVID era problem of zoom
right now, it's right here. So it is really good. If you've
just been asked a question, you can't think of an answair just like mullowed
a couple of words for a minute, and then you're like blah blah,
and then by the time you actually have to un mute yourself, you've thought
of things. It's terrible, by the way, if anyone on your team
knows how to read lips right, insert that video kid in. But then
you know we're basically describing toppers comment. It's like, here's the bits to
make the thing you were talking about. I mean, obviously this is not
going to run GPT three interface with it to an extent, Like, but
you're talking about maybe an image recognizer or an expression recognizer, like this is
reasonable to run. It have so many products here, it's not just the
three that I listed off. Oh, like the Wi Fi antennas and U
NFC antennas. Yeah. Oh there's a fruit feather wings. Yeah, so
that's another thing. It's compatible with eight of fruits feather wings, so that
makes it even easier to start out. A feather wing is basically a shield
that you can attach to your device that already has some stuff in it to
get you started, like for interfacing more yeah, for interfacing. So for
instance, it could have a bunch of sensors already tottered on, and then
you can just go build your project immediately. And there are some really cool
feather wings out there. I have. I have so many of them because
when I when I first started the business, well when I first started a
particle, we all get an education stipend and they told me I was allowed
to use it on parts if I wanted to. So heta fruit got the
majority of my education stipends. Do I have to click plus one on every
one of these things? Can you just send me please? Yes? The
skull shield, the skull feather skull shaped feather wing is very vital to my
development has a programmer training, and you know what. The big problem with
that, by the way, and the problem that I see with so many
makers that you were kind of preferring to earlier is paralysis by the sheer amount
of options out there. So like one thing that I've seen happen over and
over again that I'm trying to combat by making cool projects available, but is
getting a device thinking well, I'm going to make something cool with it,
and then thinking, oh, there are too many cool things out there,
how can I do this? Picking one is the I know people say naming
is the hardest part of computer science, but picking something's even harder. Yeah,
so what's next for you? What's in your inbox after you leave here?
Well, I've just been an Edin refringe for a month and then came
straight here, So I think I'm going to go home and sleep for a
little bit. But after that, I've got a couple other conferences coming out,
and I'm absolutely stoked. Particle is sponsoring this year is Bay Area Major
Fair, and we have got some pretty cool stuff in flight for for that,
We've got a very fun booth coming along and some interactive projects. Where's
the maker fair. It's in the Bay Area. Okay, so this year
bay Area it is odd. I usually one of the convention centers. No,
this year it's on an island, and I'm island. I think that's
across from San Francisco. Yes, you've gotta. I think we're flat.
We're all sign them to the Oakland Airport and going there. It looks beautiful
and I haven't been to a big Maker event since pre Covide four years.
It's it's so exciting. The it's funny, the whole team right now.
We're like giddy little kids, excitedly talking about it, like we can do
this, we can do that. Do you think this? These people are
going to have that booth. Uh, we're making a little carnival game.
I'm just wondering. You know, folks went head down for a few years.
I wonder what they're going to come out with. What do they bring
into the fair that you might surprise us? All, Well, that's actually
a really interesting thing too. Is Mare Island there? Okay? There?
I don't know why I thought. I think I know someone who lives on
the other island and they were talking about it. But I it's very interesting
to me how much makerdom has changed in the past few years, because when
particles started and when I first started getting interested in maker stuff, it was
much more in person like. Maker spaces were everywhere. Now they've kind of
gone away a lot. You could go to a maker fair and see a
lot. There are still some amazing maker spaces. But what I found is
since a lot of these tools are getting cheaper yea, and people were stuck
at home, be hard pressed to find someone who doesn't have a three D
printer out of I got a three D printer years before I got a two
D printer, like I only just purchased a two D printer a couple of
months ago. It's when you mix the two up and you actually print a
word document in plastics. I know, it's very wasteful. The other I
got into the routine, there's a couple of great mill spots, these digital
mills, so I would just send my files to them and they'd send it
back to the back the objects and often in a single day turnaround, so
you could experiment to your heart's content. Really, it's a little more expensive
than just having the machine yourself. I also appreciate, like having having a
pla printer yourself, but then sending it out for a different plastic or a
mixed plastic or even I've had one minute rendered in centered toluminum or even resin.
Like, I am not going to have a resin printer where I live
because I have asthma and they're a bit spilling. The fumes are bad for
your lungs. Yeah, you need a build, you need a vent I'd
like whoever use as a resin printer to have very good ventilation. Ventilation.
It's not a bad idea. It's not a bad idea. And masking up
is always good when you're doing anything that require that involves a lot of fumes.
So you're talking about the range, how how far did you go down
the maker path? Right? So, when you have a room that has
a mask requirement on the outside, you've gone a certain path distance down the
path. See I'm very excited because I've been living in apartments for a while,
but I just bought my place for the first time with my partner,
and that means I get to have a room with pegboards on the wall.
I get a pegboard room. So you need you need a hood fan right
away. No, we've agreed that the anything that requires venting will happen in
the garage because we're lucky enough to have a garage. And also my pegboard
room is right next to the kitchen, so we're not mixing those fear,
that's not a good combination. Why does the raman smell like resin? Did
I accidentally put plastic in my tea? Again? You don't have to,
There was already plastic there. Micro plastics off. This is a hurt.
Thank you, Thank you so much for having me fun to geeked out and
talking. It looks like some great products you out here. Yeah, like
the basic stamps. There goes hundreds of hours, but joy flow, isn't
it so much fun? Well? Thanks again, thank you so much for
having me. Welcome and we'll see you next time on dot net rocks.
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