Podcasts about maker faires

Dale Dougherty discusses the launch and evolution of Make: Magazine, a DIY technology publication, since its inception in February 2005.  The conversation includes insights from original team members Mark Frauenfelder, Dave Albertson, Shawn Connolly, and Paul Spinrad, as well as current editor-in-chief Keith Hammond. The magazine, launched amidst a declining print industry, aimed to share project instructions and inspire readers to engage in DIY activities. The first issue showcased a kite aerial photography project by Cris Benton, exemplifying ingenious solutions like using popsicle sticks and a Silly Putty Viscous Timer.  They reminisced about early decision-making, the importance of design, challenges in documenting projects, and how the community's growth influenced by Maker Faires. The script highlights the magazine's impact on the maker movement, transitioning into various mediums and reflecting on personal anecdotes from team members over the years. The call ends with updates on their current pursuits and the lasting significance of Make: Magazine.https://make.co/make-cast/

Maker Faires are slowly coming back. After not happening for two years, Maker Faire Long Island took place in June at Port Jefferson Village's Explorium. Everybody was happy to come back. said co-producers of Maker Faire Long Island, Angeline Judex and Lisa C. Rodriguez. Angeline is the Explorium's Executive Director and Lisa is in digital media marketing for the science center. They share that with the makers back and families gathered, the magic was back.

We live in a digital age which gives us many benefits. However, many kids have lost a connection to working with their hands. When kids create, they take pride in what they've made, break down complex ideas, collaborate with others, and learn skills that can save or earn them money.Mike Schloff created Maplewoodshop in 2016 to help all children develop life skills through woodworking in any classroom. He's an experienced local woodworker and parent of a 14-year-old and a 12-year-old. Mike has taught woodworking to over 100 children at Maker Faires and at a collective school in Montclair. He has worked with elementary school children in classroom settings in Hoboken. He has also taught ESL and has mentored people over his 20-year professional career. Mike is a member of the North Jersey Woodworkers Association.Books mentioned in the podcast:Building To Teach - Teaching Math through Boatbuilding - Joe YouchaThe Wisdom of Hands - Book on teaching woodworking to youth - Doug StoweBy Hound and Eye - Graphic novel on teaching design and geometry - Jim Tolpin and George WalkerFrom Truth to Tools - Graphic novel on language, the physical world, and geometry -  - Jim Tolpin and George WalkerConnect with Mike & Maplewoodshop:Website: maplewoodshop.comYouTube: www.youtube.com/channel/UCpPIu2juABNjm_2ZoMjrx4wTwitter: @MaplewoodshopNJFacebook: @MaplewoodshopNJChris Woods is the host of the STEM Everyday Podcast... Connect with him:Website: dailystem.comTwitter: @dailystemInstagram: @dailystemYouTube: youtubeGet Chris's book Daily STEM on AmazonSupport the show

Thomas und Daniel sind Maker - aber was ist das eigentlich und wie kommt man zum Maken? In dieser Folge geht es darum, welche Werkzeuge und Maschinen in Maker-Spaces zu finden sind, was Maker-Faires sind und was die Make-Community ausmacht.

In 2020, Dr. Andreea Gorbatai and two co-authors published a research paper in the journal Organization Science titled: "Making Space for Emotions: Empathy, Contagion, and Legitmacy's Double-Edged Sword." It's about the maker movement and what holds it together. It turns out, it's not skills and tools as much as it is emotions and empathy -- they are the glue for community. Dr. Gorbatai is a professor in the management department at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley. Growing up in Romania, she is a sociologist by training and she is particularly interested in studying "new forms of organizations and organizing." Her "Making Space for Emotions" paper looks at how a new field of endeavor starts with a core community and then struggles to maintains its connections and coherence as it grows. As it becomes more popular or recognized, a process called legitimation, more people are exposed to it and the community grows but at the expense of losing some of its less coherence. This is the double-edged sword that the paper refers to.Her own interest in the maker movement led her to use it as a case study. She wondered what role Maker Faire played in maintaining those connections in the community and inviting more people to understand makers and participate. She believes that having a shared emotional experience is what connects people to each other and the community. "What happens at Maker Faires that revitalizes the maker community and brings people together into a shared maker identity?" was one of her research questions. Her answer is that being a maker is less about credentials and accomplishments and more about how you feel about yourself, your projects and the stories that you share with others who realize, in turn, that they have stories of their own to share.Link to research paper: https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/10.1287/orsc.2020.1387Transcript: http://www.makezine.com/2021/07/01/emotion-and-empathy-are-glue-for-makers/

(Photo courtesy of Michele Frances, and used with permission.)   Austin robot enthusiast Luke Keyes hated the idea of cancelling trick-or-treat this year. Halloween is his favorite holiday.  Pre-pandemic, he and his wife shared their enthusiasm for candy and technology with  small visitors through a "haunted science lab" which Luke and his fellow makers created.  But this year, the pandemic prevented that kind of Halloween interaction. Then, inspiration struck. Luke, who has been creating robots since his college days, realized that his six-foot creation, Artie the Robot, could deliver candy to trick-or-treaters. And now, with Artie's help, he's planning on a fun and socially-distanced Halloween celebration. Celebrations are nothing new to Artie.  Since Luke created him in 2013, he's appeared at ribbon cuttings, SXSW sessions and Maker Faires, according to his Facebook page.  (Yes, Artie the Robot does have a Facebook page of his own!) Luke likes to use Artie--and his other robotic creations--to encourage kids to create robots of their own.  Meanwhile, he continues to have fun building robots of his own for  Bot Party,  an improvisational theatre organization which builds improv pieces around robots. Luke shared Artie's story, offered a preview of Artie's Halloween activities and shared some of his favorite resources for anyone who'd like to build their own robot. On this edition of Over Coffee®, you will hear: How robots first captured Luke's imagination; The story of Artie the Robot; The resources Luke recommends, for future fellow robot creators; Some background on Artie's experience as a contender for the Guinness Book of World Records; How Luke's annual Halloween creative projects evolved into using Artie to deliver candy, this year; The ways he modified Artie to be a "candy delivery robot"; Safety precautions which Luke and his wife are taking, as Artie delivers Halloween treats; A mechanism Luke has designed to prevent kids from finding Artie "scary"'; Luke's Halloween plans for Artie the Robot; How Luke is inspiring the next generation of robot creators! Where to see Luke's work online (including his creations for a cool interactive group with which he works, in his spare time!); What's next, for Artie the Robot, as Luke upgrades him! And, another new robot which Luke currently has in the works.    

It's a special celebration episode as the DesignSpark engineering platform turns 10! Pete, Robbie and Dave discuss their favourite projects and memories over the last decade, including sending a Superman action figure to the edge of space and back. We also have an exclusive interview with modelling jedi Jude Pullen to find out more about his BBC TV shows, projects and his Obi Wan Cardboard Kenobi. 

This episode features a conversation with Dale Dougherty. Dale is the co-founder of O’Reilly Media and the founder of Maker Media, which publishes Make Magazine and initiated the wildly popular worldwide Maker Faires. Dale is widely considered to be the godfather of the Maker Movement and is one of its greatest champions. We talk to Dale about his partnership with Tim O’Reilly, developing the first-ever commercial website, the dawn of the World Wide Web, and the past-present-future of the Maker Movement. Dale also goes into detail about best practices for empowering Makers and DIYers in schools and everywhere.••• Follow Dale on Twitter: @dalepd

 In his latest book, Creating Things That Matter: The Art and Science of Innovations That Last, David Edwards unveils elements essential to the creative process employed by the world’s best innovators. As a creator, writer, and educator, Edwards attributes his deep and persistent love affair with creativity to his father who took time to play with him, take his five-year-old world seriously, and believe in his dreams. Consequently, as an adult, Edwards has created breathable insulin, edible food packaging, and digital scents. Edwards is the founder of Le Laboratoire in Paris, France and later in Cambridge, Massachusetts where his culture lab includes the experimental restaurant Café ArtScience. KEY POINTS Creating is highly expressive! It’s a way we learn, discover, and communicate. We need to create beautiful solutions to our challenges—solutions that are so compelling that we adopt them. Combining art and science is a process. Culture labs – a place for experimenting using the creator’s cycle (ideation, experimentation, and exhibition or expression) Within the culinary experience, Edwards finds rich opportunities to push the boundaries of serving and eating food, making it not just interesting but truly delicious. Healthcare needs to move out of the clinic and into everyday lives for it to be accessible. Aesthetics of creation have become essential to things that matter now and to those that will last over the long haul. Being mindfully aware of our own environment helps us see things afresh and can lead to surprising expression. Major creators tend to be quite generous, such as Danny Hillis, inveterate inventor of the universal “pinch-to-zoom” technology on smartphones. Richard Garriott, early game developer who wanted to embed morality into games The Grassroots Creators Movement (GCM) is giving all of us the ability to express ourselves. Makers and "Maker Faires" have proliferated.  QUOTES FROM EDWARDS “Most things we create will not matter.” “Changing the human condition today will be harder than it was in ages past.” “Creation stirs within us the profound biological sense that we are not alone, that we are wired for relationships, and that we rely on each other for our mutual well-being.” “Making things that matter—not just to you or me—is fundamental to the survival of the human condition. It’s something our biology has programmed us to do.” “Creating what matters and has not existed before starts with what matters to us. We don’t create…by coercion. We create because we feel like it.” “Creators love frontiers because a frontier has no boundary.” “There’s nothing as fun as creating tomorrow.” “As creators, we all need a Florence…What we most lack is the oxygen, or culture, which can give people everywhere the confidence that what matters to them can matter to many others, and the guidance that point their aspirations in fruitful directions.” “Over the last decade, people have started to make things without being told they should and on a scale never seen before.” BUY Creating Things That Matter: The Art and Science of Innovations That Last RECOMMENDATIONS Watch David Edwards’s TEDTalk, “Eating Better with Digital Scent.” Learn more about the World Frontier Forum here. Connect with us! Facebook Instagram Twitter YouTube Website Special thanks… Music Credit Sound Editing Credit   

After Maker Faire Prague, Prusa let Tom, 3D Printing Nerd and 3D Maker Noob have their studio for an hour to jam about recent 3D printing topics! In this episode, we talk about the demise of Maker Media, the creators of Make Magazine and licencors of Maker Faires - and what that means for the future of faires in general. In other news, a CR-10 caught fire and a Twitter user was caught advertising a 3D printer with photos stolen from several community members. And for the "big" topic, we fantasize about the future of consumer / maker / "low end" 3D printers and what there even is left to improve. Which... gets a bit awkward. ### SHOW NOTES ### 3D Printing Nerd's channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_7aK9PpYTqt08ERh1MewlQ 3D Maker Noob's channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2Tc0TsvFxC83zF1w5x1PWQ Maker Media ceases operation https://hackaday.com/2019/06/07/maker-media-ceases-operations/ CR-10 is lit https://www.reddit.com/r/3Dprinting/comments/bxxjsw/creality_printers_is_having_a_fire_sale/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app and https://m.facebook.com/?_rdr#!/groups/1642675669368828?view=permalink&id=2090505217919202&anchor_composer=false "Felanfeli" stealing photos https://twitter.com/Barnacules/status/1138600958156369921?s=19 (and others)

The Big Ideas team is back in the Academica Media studio this week, and they have some great education topics to share with you! First, Sarah, Mike and Ryan discuss National Novel Writing Month and the importance of getting students to do more personal, narrative-style writing assignments where they have the opportunity to find their unique voice as a writer. Sarah mentions the Veteran's Story Project and the American Creed writing project as great resources in this area. Next, our hosts discuss a recent Washington Post article by Professor Daniel Willingham discussing the controversial debate regarding the use of phonics versus a whole language approach to teach reading. Finally, the team talks about the emerging phenomenon of maker faires in schools and how students can benefit from having maker education in the school environment. The hosts give shout-outs to Joe Mazza (@makerdads) and Michael Lomuscio (@michaellomuscio), who are doing great things in this area. Articles: National Novel Writing Month: https://bit.ly/2gIvBp7National Writing Project American Creed: https://bit.ly/2PBnugUPhonics vs. Whole Language Article: https://wapo.st/2JAwlKjHow "Makers" Make the Classroom More Inclusive: https://nyti.ms/2Pw9ZizHosts: Sarah Boulos Fye (@readwithfye), Mike Hernandez (@edtechmichael), Ryan Kairalla (@ryankair)

Duane Benson from Screaming Circuits shares DFA Tips and a piece of history as he shares the story behind the scenes in developing quick turn prototypes. Listen to learn how one entrepreneur brought fresh perspective to the business that led to great success. And see why Screaming Circuits is uniquely positioned to handle all the leading edge components that PCB designers have available.     Show Highlights: Screaming Circuits was founded on the premise to get prototypes built quickly. It was a struggle to get small volume prototypes built and a market need was discovered. For prototyping - going abroad invites its own set of risks. A traditionally 6-8 week process, Screaming Circuits does in hours. We don’t specialize in a vertical industry, so we see a lot of the leading edge components. Layout isn’t taught in schools or its self taught. The experts who knew how to make layouts work perfectly have retired. We built a business around stuff being wrong. Stuff isn’t going to be right when it arrives to us and we have to fix it. Why are we having a problem sourcing parts? Personal interests? Photography and decaying industrialism. Links and Resources: Screaming Circuits Website Screaming Circuits Blog Downloadable Circuit Talk   Twitter: @pcbassembly, @duanebenson Screaming Circuits on Youtube   Hey everyone this is Judy Warner with Altium’s OnTrack podcast. Welcome back to another podcast session with us. As always we have another incredible guest with us today but before we get started I wanted to invite you to please connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm very active there and share a lot of resources for engineers and PCB designers and also - I don't think I shared this in past podcasts - but we are also recording this on YouTube as well as just an audio. So you can always go to YouTube and go to the Altium channel, look under videos and you'll find these also in video format if you should prefer to listen to this and watch it in video format. And also with Altium, you can always follow us on Facebook LinkedIn or Twitter and we love engaging with you. We always love to hear from you about subject matter experts or subjects you'd like to hear or learn more about. So, without further ado,  I'd like to welcome our guest today who is Duane Benson of Screaming Circuits, out of Canby, Oregon, correct Duane? Canby that's correct. So Duane welcome, we've crossed paths for several years now and it's a delight to have you and learn more about Screaming Circuits and EMS and how designers can do things to to be more effective in the design for assembly and just learn about Screaming Circuit’s model, which is a very unique model by the way, I'm eager to jump in. Well thank you I'm really happy to be here thank you for asking me to participate in this. My joy. So why don't you start out by telling our listeners a little bit about who and what Screaming Circuits is, because it really does have a highly unique model, and kind of the why behind you guys started the company and created this model? Well it started back in 2003, actually that fifteen years ago now. Yikes.. Yeah, I know, how did that happen? So about that time our parent company Milwaukee Electronics they had a number of customers that were struggling to get small volumes of prototypes put together back in the back in the olden days - if I can use that term. Prototypes quite often were sort of slotted in on an ‘as available’ basis. So say you might need five prototypes and the EMS company would say, well we’ve got a big run going on and I can put you u on the machine in two weeks so you can get your prototypes then. And two weeks come along and something else came up, so another week... Even going back before that, back in my day they didn't focus, for example, building a prototype.We'd have a big bag of parts and some blank circuit boards, and we'd hand them to this poor technician on a Friday afternoon and the engineers would go, could you have these built up by Monday? So it was becoming a real struggle to to get prototypes, get small volumes of any sort built and a couple of our customers came and asked us and said, can you can you help us out with this? It's just not working and the Milwaukee Electronics’ management thought about it a little bit and thought, why can't we short-circuit the process? No pun intended right? Laughter. So the management experimented a little bit and then decided,  , there's an actual business here. So back about that time they brought Jared Store out here to start up what they called the Screaming Circuits division to focus specifically on getting prototypes done quickly. Mm-hmm. And  , from that time the initial focus of the initial business was basically Jared with email and phone and one of our partners Sunstone Circuits, they built the blank circuit boards - the raw fabs. They'd give us a call and say, hey one of our customers needs some prototypes built, can you guys do it? And that's how the business started. So you guys created the synergy. Now I've had the pleasure of meeting Jared once at least, through the phone and email and Jared was young right? He was the son of the owner so, I have to insert that. Because I kind of love that those of us who are kind of old dogs in the industry - I kind of love that he said, well why can't we do this? And he just kind of, like you said, a phone and a thing and just said why not. Because he wasn't constrained by the way things were done in the past which I kind of love that. Exactly he was a young entrepreneur, in fact, I don't know if he'll want to admit this but this was his first job out of college this was kind of an experiment for him to get into a career, into business and he did a fantastic job. Basically by ignoring all of the old rules. I know yeah. Yeah and then in 2004 - well somewhere between late 2003 and early 2004 - we first went online with a very, very simple quote system. We boiled it down into six different factors and based on that, came up with a quote and it was all kitted at that point. So we'd say, hey it's going to cost you this much, send us your kit, send us your files, and we'll build them up for you. Now since that time, when we were talking earlier, it seems like it's morphed into not just specifically prototypes but just quick-turn. It could be quick-turn pre-production quick-turn production even right? Yeah The world of manufacturing of electronics has really changed in the last decade and a half  . There was a time when electronics were not going to be designed and built in this country. Back in the 90s, when I was working for InFocus again, everybody was outsourcing everything and then over the next decade after that, it was all going going away. Yeah. And there was going to be nothing but high volumes manufactured offshore. Well about the time we started doing this, coincidentally the open-source hardware movement came about with the Arduino and some of the other things that came with that. Kickstarter showed up and that really changed the hardware design dynamic. It lowered the barriers to entry to building a hardware company and over the last decade and a half the hardware startup has come back with a vengeance. The problem is, as manufacturing is really, really expensive - unless you're doing super high volumes - so these companies would run a Kickstarter, they'd sell a thousand of an electronic board and nobody would build it for them. So then,  , they'd then run off into into Asia and they toured all these shops and these people would either say, no that's not enough or they’d change the design, steal the intellectual property and, you can't. There's little details like that so, getting a hundred or a thousand or five thousand is extraordinarily difficult. And yet there's an awful lot of companies that sell just that many of something. Yeah, it's really interesting that it morphed into that niche right? Yeah. You had, it sounds like you had everything, in place to fill it right? You'd built it to do address prototype - traditional prototypes - and as the market changed you were kind of ideally positioned to address those kind of start-up Kickstarter things. So you and Sunstone have worked together in parallel, I take it throughout this process? Yes they've been our partners since the beginning, and at this point they build the vast majority of our circuit boards and we do, if necessary, go elsewhere. Or if a customer sends us the boards or requests something else, but the vast majority of our boards are built by Sunstone. They're about ten miles away over in Mulino Oregon. Another big city like Canby… Laughter - well compared to Milano Canby is the big cities... Yes well it's a beautiful area. So, tell us about what you would see in a given day and then I would like to ask you to jump into speaking to designers that may be listening, and go into kind of some DFM tips and tricks. But before we do that, tell us about what are you going to see in a day? To get a picture of what happens there at Screaming Circuits there's two factors that are pretty important. One is a traditional EMS company. We we see about as many different jobs through here in a week as a traditional medium-sized EMS company we'll see in a year. Wow! And the other factor that's important to notice, is that in - using that term the olden days - getting a quote and an order for a project might be a three to four week process going back and forth with all the files, component availability, making sure   the design works and then after you place the order, you've got the NPI process which is another three to four work weeks. So, you've got a six to eight week process that we do in six to eight hours. How is that possible? I mean we may not have enough time here Duane, but I've been in the EMS industry and it’s an extremely complex process, just getting the components you need and making sure they're right and there's not obsolete parts, and that you've got a clean BOM, and it's so complex. How have you condensed it without giving away your secrets? Well there's a lot of things that matter if you're building a hundred thousand of something or a million of something. At that point fractions of a penny count and you're going to spend a lot more time quoting. You're gonna have to worry about getting large quantities of components if you need 20 of a board you can go to Digi-Key and get the parts for a buck, that would cost you a quarter of a penny if you bought them at high volume, and that's still fine now, that's part of it and then you don't have to worry about some of the inefficiencies that would absolutely kill a high-volume manufacturing manufacturer. You don't have to worry about those because if you have to tweak things by hand, while that is more expensive per unit, if you're building 20 or a hundred or a thousand it doesn't matter quite so much. So really what we've done is, we've stepped back and we said, what is important and what is not. The objective is to get working boards into an engineer's hands as quickly as possible and you'll notice there aren't things like how do we make it the absolute least expensive, or things of that sort, it's about getting the working board's as quick as possible so you focus on just the things that matter for that. Right, you mentioned when we talked a few weeks ago, about it becoming what you had called a transactional model, which is really a different industry and you can go online, place your order in a very transactional fashion, but it also speeds up your time to market, and gives you something highly valuable? Yes it does, we don't we don't spend an awful lot of time on the financial component of it. For the most part you give us a credit card and we start building so we don't have to worry about the bank component of it. For larger companies we do, because some people, the government or whatever, they have to operate that way. But for the most part you just give us a credit card and that again cuts some time out of it. We also look at each order as an individual transaction, that's why we call it transactional manufacturing, or unforecastable. We don't have to worry about the fact that you're not gonna need exactly 500 every month for the next 24 months. In traditional EMS, you have to worry about that, you plan for that. We don't worry about that, we don't care. Yeah it's interesting as well it's neat model and I see it as a real enabler. So, congratulations to you guys. All right, let's dig in and give our listeners that are designers and engineers some tips around DFA. The way that you and I originally came to know each other is, I had been blogging and writing and then I came across a little publication you put out called Circuit Talk in which you were doing what I was doing, which was giving designers some really immediate tips to apply to make their jobs hopefully a little bit easier and so, I think you've done a really nice job of that. So can you talk about why you started Circuit Talk and then go ahead and share some of those tips or tricks that are around design for assembly that's gonna make designers’ jobs easier and smooth the time to deliver a good product in time to market. Well thank you. You  know the volume of jobs that we get - it does lead to chaos of sorts - but it also is a huge advantage in that we get to see every single mistake that anybody's gonna make. We don't specialize in a vertical industry so we don't only see mistakes related to a certain type of component tree. Name a component that's leading-edge, we've undoubtedly seen it and, so we see these things - and it's not just beginners, it's not just experienced designers, it's not just big or small or university - everybody makes the same mistakes. It's so complex and there are so many variables, so many new types of components. Geometries are shrinking and in parallel to that people have less and less time to design these things. Quite often layout isn't taught at schools, or it's self-taught. The experts who knew exactly how to make a layout work perfectly have retired now, or they've been let go, or things have changed so fast they can't keep up. Mm-hmm. So we see these problems every day. Case in point, one that I write about quite often relates to the QFN Quad Flat-Pack No Lead, and then the DFM. The DFM leads along one side. They have this big metal heat slug in the middle, looks like a very simple component, it's cool, it's small, has great signal characteristics. But most of the CAD software, when you try and use a QFN, the footprint is wrong. It comes from the library with the solder paste layer, not designed specifically for the component, so you've got to imagine flipping a QFN upside down. You've got a little row of contacts around the outside - very small - and then a big giant heat slug in the middle that covers almost the entire component. So most of the library components we found have a full aperture opening, so the solder paste layer is completely open for that heat slug in the middle. And what happens is you end up with too much solder in the middle, so the part floats up and the connects on the side don't connect. Oh boy. Yeah and this is even more prevalent with some of the open-source CAD software, or some of them with a lot of user-generated content, nobody told those folks how to make the footprint properly. I see. Quite often the manufacturers, in their data sheets, even specify it that way. But what you need to do is, to modify the footprint so in that center pad, you get somewhere between 50 and 75 percent paste coverage. So, you take out the default paste layer for the center pad and you put in a little windowpane-looking thing - problem solved. Interesting. Yeah it's a little scary, unless you have a partner that's on the ball to what you can accidentally pick up off a data sheet or how to interpret that data right? So okay well, that's a good one. Another one we run across these tiny little micro BGA's 0.4 mm pitch, some of them even 0.3 mm. I've actually seen a 0.24 mm pitch BGA. Yeah, some of the rules change with the bigger BGA's. You want non-solder mask defined pads, so you want the solder mask opening to be slightly larger than the little pad where the BGA ball’s gonna sit down. Yeah. With some of the 0.4 mm pitch BGAs, you want solder mask pad or defined pads, otherwise you get bridging. Oh yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, it kind of depends on the geometry of the solder ball, but that's a pretty common error as well. So you see these things that component manufacturers haven't fully studied, haven't fully published and they are  just setting people up for problems. Yeah, and what I have found - and not just in relation to components - I have talked to people who manufacture either components, or they manufacture laminates, and what's not widely understood is that sometimes the studies they’re doing is us. Yeah we’re their guinea pigs. Yeah, and then we yell and scream and we give them back data and then they produce overtime accurate data sheets. I was stunned to hear that, but it's absolutely true. They need to get stuff to market because the market is demanding it, and the testing is so complex and so widespread, and the applications are so widespread, that they can only go so far. And then the rest of the data has to come from real world. Yeah the the hardware industry really is paralleling what the software industry did.  We had open source software then open source hardware. With software, we started calling it ‘beta test the world’ because you couldn't beta test anymore, it's too complex. Right, it’s too complex, so we become the beta testers and I don't think that's often understood. When I first understood it my jaw about dropped because I'm from the old school, like you are and it's like; wait nothing would ever go out that was not fully vetted or understood and tested, and things have just gotten so complex. And so there's just a hard limitation there, it's not a bad business practice or whatever, but it's a reality that I think is wise for designers and engineers to keep in mind - another encouragement to work closely with people like you, that can say, we've seen this already a bunch of times, we know what's going to occur here. Yeah we've built our whole business around everything being wrong basically, start to finish. It sounds kinda funny, but It's all about this stuff probably isn't going to be right coming into us, so we've got to figure out how to make it work. I don't know, like what happened to the world Duane? This is not how we started but here we are. Another thing you talked to me a little bit about, you had mentioned one time in a conversation, about polarity markings. Oh yeah. That's that's maybe third or fourth in terms of the issues that we see here with diodes especially. Capacitors somewhat, but diodes even more so. Any kind of ambiguity, when you're dealing with machines, it's a problem. If you've got a barrier diode for example, it's backwards from what you would consider a conventional diode. So if someone marks it with a plus and it's a barrier diode and they're expecting us to know whether the plus goes to the anode or the cathode, we're gonna put it in the conventional manner, not knowing it's a barrier diode it's gonna be backwards so you can't use a plus to mark a diode. You might think minus, Also, does that mean negative or is that the lion on the diode symbol you can't do that because it doesn't tell us anything you've got to say K for cathode not C - because then we might think it's a capacitor, or the full diode symbol the down - lot of people will put in silkscreen, the mark that's on the bottom of a surface mount diode... Uh-hu. -which at  first glance seems like it makes a lot of sense - but only if you give us the exact diode that you got the marker off of. I've seen two diodes 0.603s in the exact same package from the exact same manufacturer just a couple characters off, in the part number, and literally, on one the mark is the anode mark on the other it's the cathode mark. I've got to I've got to do a datasheet and I have a clipping from that data sheet on the Screaming Circuits blog that shows that it's got this part anode mark, this part cathode mark. I made the same mistake myself. On one of my boards I put the little marker on there and I gave gave the company the orientation and the CAD files, and then I made a substitution because one part was no longer available and used the other one - same thing but it was backwards because I went from cathode mark to anode mark.  So, remove ambiguity. A few years ago I would say, it's okay to mimic the silkscreen - just give us the exact part. But with supply chain availability being such an issue right now, I would not rely on the mark that's underneath the diode because they can reverse if we have to substitute something. Okay I'm gonna put a pause there and talk about what the heck is going on with supply chain. Stuff about diodes like these, very basic building blocks to design, why are we having problems sourcing parts? Well we've been told a couple of things from suppliers. One is, they're telling us that the automotive companies are buying up literally an entire line. They'll come to a component manufacturer and say this particular part: I need all of your production, all of it and so there it goes out of stock. Internet-of-Things companies - the super, hyper-mobile devices are also causing issues because they're increasing the demand in the super small components. Well then the companies that make the parts don't have fab capacity to also make the larger ones so, some of the component manufacturers are telling us that they're going to stop making some of the bigger form factors 1206s 0805s even 0603s may become even more and more scarce because if they can make 0402 or 0201 to cover all that range they'll do it and not make the other form factors. Holy... I don't know what to say about that - if I was a design engineer I'd be freaking out - this puts people in a really tough spot! It really does and it's gonna change the way some things are designed. We have always had a policy that we will not substitute anything without explicit approval. Even looking at a bypass capacitor - 0.1 microfarad 16 volt bypass capacitor - in some cases you need exact parameters. There’s parameters you need to be exactly the same so you can't substitute. But there are also plenty of cases where it's just sort of by guess and by golly: yeah it's a 0.1, it could be 16 volt, 10 volt, 25 volt, 50 volt, whatever. If that's the case, people are gonna have to start being really flexible in terms of what they will accept for a component and maybe at some point the industry will have a flag on a bill of material that says: this one's engineered so it has to be exact. This one, just make it close. Another thing, our industry is changing so fast, it's just a big reason why Altium and I've   decided this podcast would be a good idea. Same reason why your Circuit Talk publication is a good idea because it's like we can't get the education out fast enough or get the news out. Like holy cow, why can't I get this capacitor? It's not a unique form factor specialized BGA they're capacitors! This is like bread and butter, so it's been puzzling to learn about that and I'm just really interested to see how these component manufacturers are going to deal with this and and again how designers are going to be forced to think hard about these parts it's really strange. Anyway sorry for taking a little side trip there. That's important, it's a significant issue. We're being told this could last until 2020 and when we get out of this allocation, the industry is going to be different and, as I said, a lot of the bigger form factors consider moving all to 402s. It's more difficult to deal with these smaller ones but those are the ones, when the component manufacturers catch up, it's going to be in the smaller form factors because they can sell them to people building small devices as well as big. So think about that, be very, very careful when you're picking the specific component and tell us, and other manufacturers like us, what parameters are important. Goodness that’s a great tip. You know I hadn't thought about it until just this minute when you were talking; I'm wondering if this will drive an uptick in embedded? Embedded like embedded passives? Uh-hu better passives. I don't know I've been waiting to see that. I joined this company in 2005 and embedded passives were in the news at that point, and I actually made a prediction on the Screaming Circuits blog, that in ten years - I think I said -  80% of the passives would be embedded passives. I don't know that we've ever seen one. I guess technically you wouldn't see it because it's inside it. No but you would know it was there, because I know it from my board manufacturing past, you would know cuz you would have to process it differently. It's a different process but I don't know what the cost trade-offs are there, but I've met Bruce Mahler from Omega and I've met some of those folks, and I'm just wondering if this allocation will drive, but I don't know what the cost trade-offs are or performance comparative. That makes me think, I need to call Bruce Mahler and get him on the blog because it's an interesting thing to ponder in lieu of what's going on in the marketplace. Yeah. Anything else you would mention off the top of your head that's something you see repeatedly that's a design for assembly thing that you would recommend designers to take a look at closely? Well the polarity, the QFNs, BGAs as I mentioned. Something that isn't necessarily quite so obvious is the data files that is an important part of design for assembly. Ambiguity on a board is bad, ambiguity in a data file is bad. Bills of Materials, if there are parts in there that don't match the board, that's probably 80% of the jobs that come through here, have some sort of a Bill of Materials issue. So, double-check that that's accurate and that it matches your CAD files. If you can give your manufacturer the intelligent CAD files like an ODB++ or IPC 2581, that significantly reduces the chance of error, but then there's a little irony in there too that a lot of board houses still prefer Gerber's so we have seen cases where someone saves and then; oh yeah, I can give you the ODB++, but they forget they made a slight change and so now we have Gerber's that don't match the ODP++ so, make sure all of your files are consistent. Make sure the Bill of Material is clear and finalized. All in all if you add up all of the files issues that we see, that's probably one of the most common problems. I mean, I run into those problems for myself. I designed some boards and run up to the factory here, and I know how to do this, in theory I know how to do this, but I regularly make mistakes that my co-workers chide me for. Well I think again, that leads to the complexity of the data that's available. The data sheets; whether they're right. I mean it is such a complex thing and it amazes me that we can even manufacture circuit boards and then put components on it and come out workable sometimes. Because it is such a complex process, I'm really glad that - actually I appreciate it - I don't understand all those steps but having worked for for both a really high end EMS that sold to tier one’s, very complex boards, and also having worked for a variety of board shops. I really appreciate the complexity in both those disciplines, and I think sometimes because a board shows up as a line item on a BOM that complexity sometimes can get lost on you. But yeah we're building things, even here Altium, into our own tool that helps, like an active BOM, things like that, that hopefully help. I think design tool manufacturers like us, I think we're doing a better job helping in that regard. Right yeah, definitely! Well the last couple items I wanted to talk to you about... well thank you for all that by the way, and again, we will share in the show notes your website. The Circuit Talking, I would recommend to anyone who is listening or watching - that you subscribe to Duane's blog or just Circuit Talk or whatever and we'll put all the links in because again, he's got his feet in the fire and runs up against these things as he said. Because they're putting through such a width of product. Like I used to work for an EMS, and like you said, it was a vertical. So we worked with military Tier one, and so the type of bores we saw was a niche, but you're seeing everything. Yeah, literally I mean we worked on a camera board, the electronics of it, for National Geographic - it's a plexiglass globe, they drop it to the bottom of the ocean, it's got a chain on it and when the chain rusts through the camera bobs to the top and they pick it up again. We've got stuff being built for the 2020 Mars Rover so, literally down in the ocean up into space and and anything in between, we've built Ardium base stuff, real simple things, through holes; we built a board with five thousand placements. It's just all over the place and it's just absolutely the most fascinating place I've ever worked certainly, because of that. Yeah I can see that and again, kudos for you - it's easier to do a quick podcast or write a blog post or produce a Circuit Talk that can go out to thousands of people and get that information out in that kind of global sense and be helpful right. Yeah rather than tell one person at a time. Exactly it's kind of a scalability of getting that knowledge out, so I really appreciate what you've done over the years. One thing I wanted to ask you about which it was a fun thing is about; I don't know six to eight months ago, I had the privilege to go with the Altium team for the first time, to a Maker Faire because we have Circuit Maker and Circuit Studio - Circuit Maker is free and and now we've bought a company called Upverter, which is also free, and in the cloud, and we also have Circuit Studio. So, we went there with those products and because of my position here as Director of Community Engagement, I hadn't had any exposure really to the Maker community, other than seeing stuff online, and I went and it was like drinking from a firehose. It was so much fun… goofiest things... it was so much fun. So, I'm walking the aisles, kind of collecting things to write about, or learn about, and I come across Duane Benson, wearing what looks like rap swag around his neck - it was like a clock you were wearing right, or something - he looks like a rapper and I'm used to thinking of him as this Duane Benson from Screaming Circuits and here you are, like fully immersed in the Maker space, and you had designed this device and had LEDs on it and I'm like: what are you doing here? So tell me about how you've come to serve Makers. It doesn't seem like, from a profitability or a business model, that it would be a market that a company like Screaming Circuits would address. So how'd you get there Duane? Well you could say that I'm a bit of a method actor, I mean I love... I've been designing small circuit boards for a very long time and writing the software for them for a very long time and one way of looking at it, is I'm a Hacker and a Maker who happens to be lucky enough to have a manufacturing facility. But more specifically, those Hackers and those Makers they are starting businesses. Yes they are. Many of those businesses become our customers whether they be crowdfunding or bootstrapping or getting investments, they are the future. The Maker community has a lot of students in it. It has a lot of weekday engineer weekend Hackers, it has a lot of people who aspire to start a new business and just such a wealth of creativity. And part of our mission I always like to look at, I'm just one person, we're just one company but if we can make our tiny little corner of the planet just a little bit better then we've been successful and all of those people who want to design electronics... M-Hmm.. -We know what they don't know. I mean, we know what kind of problems they’re going to run across before they do, and so if we know what they don't know why don't we pass that off? And some of those people will have boards built with our competitors. Some of them will build them themselves, some of them will have us build them. Whatever, we're helping them understand this industry better. And we are helping them build better boards. That's what we really want to do. That's why we're at the Maker Faires ultimately. It does always have to lead back to more business for us, and it does. People see Screaming Circuits, they get the Circuit Talk and they read it, and it's Circuit Talk a Screaming Circuits publication so all of that winds its way back eventually, to helping the business here, and that's how we can afford to do it. But if we can help the business build and grow the business and help these budding designers - everybody wins. This is why I love you, and love you guys. I just I love that philosophy, I love that approach. I try to live by an old Zig Ziglar thing and this reminds me of you and Screaming Circuits’ model that you just explained. Zig Ziglar used to say, you really can't have everything you want in life. If you just help enough other people get what they want. Right. So it's kind of knowing unconsciously that if you put good things out in the world, and you do the right thing, and you're ethical, and you have integrity, and you serve people, that good will come back to you and and you'll do okay. And I think that's a big key to your success actually, by kind of leading with service and and not ignoring the bottom line. We are in business to make money, we have to do that, or we're not in business anymore. So, I really appreciate that. Well we're wrapping up now and I think you've listened to a couple of these podcasts now and so two questions for you. One are you a nerd or a geek? [Laughter] I’m a Gunerd… That's the best answer I've ever gotten yes you're a Gunerd. Yeah, there was a time when those were really pejorative terms but I think nerds and geeks have taken it back and said, you know what, no we're not going to be ashamed of liking technology and loving it,we're proud of it. I mean, yeah so I’m a Gunerd. Oh my gosh, I'm totally gonna steal that and use it somehow Duane, that will come back to haunt you later I promise. [Laughter] And the other question is, but I think I know what the answer is, if you've listened to podcasts. I always ask designers and electronics professionals in the end - this is ‘designers after hours’ - so because there is so much creativity involved a lot of people, like you said are Makers or Hackers, or they play a musical instruments or they're sculptors or whatever. So, what is your kind of guilty pleasure that you like to do after hours? It would have to be photography. I chase animals around and take pictures of them, animals, landscapes, and then I have sort of a weird passion for old, decaying industrial sites as well. But photography would probably have to be my passion when I'm not playing with electronics. That's so cool. Do you have a website where you share any of that or is it just mostly personal stuff and you keep your photos and share them with friends and family and whatnot? It's mostly a personal thing I have had them on websites before but it's just my thing. And and what do you mean about industrial sites? Well, old decaying, industrial and rusty factories. There's a place here just north of Canby Oregon City and we've got a waterfall on the Willamette River and most people think of waterfalls as pristine, and nature and that's all wonderful, I love that. But this one: back in the 1800's they started building paper mills and  they built a set of locks. It's the oldest - well till they just recently closed down - it was the oldest continuously operated locks west of the Mississippi. And so now, you overlook the river from a nice restaurant and you see this shut down, decaying, industrial plant and - well no it's not the beauty of the river - but I see a sort of beauty in the symmetry and in the the way people constructed these things. It's almost like an architectural dig, you can see things from a hundred years ago, from eighty years ago, from sixty years ago, and you can see the evolution of that, as this thing built up and then as they abandoned it, and there's just for some reason...  I really enjoy that that sort of a view as well as the natural views as well. They do have a really unique aesthetic and things have changed. It is kind of like a little time capsule and the rest is actually beautiful and sometimes the design itself is beautiful. Yeah well thank you again, this has been fabulous and I'm sure we can talk more and more, but thank you so much for giving me so much of your time and sharing DFA tips and the story of Screaming Circuits, and we wish you continued success and we'll certainly share the website and Circuit Talk. And if there's anything else you'd like to share with us, give me a holler and I'll make sure we include those in the show notes. Thank you very much, it's been a privilege to be on the show here, thank you. Again this has been Judy Warner with Altium’s OnTrack Podcast and Duane Benson from Screaming Circuits. we look forward to seeing you next time until then always stay OnTrack.  

Maker Faire Ruhr (Dortmund, .de) came and went, so this is the last time you'll hear about my project for that - finally. Apart from that, this episode is about hot air soldering and upcoming events, local and remote, on- and offline. recent Maker Faire Ruhr (2018-03-10 & -11) IFcomp (submission for entries starts on June 1st) Retro Challenge (in April) HomeComputerMuseum (Helmond, .nl) opens on March 17th my Maker Faire entry: Qibec 1-bit 1-instruction transistor-CPU Hackalot hackerspace (Eindhoven, .nl) Electromagnetic Fields camp (Aug/Sept, England) Mithotronic's LEDmePlay game-platform Vintage Computer Festival Europe 19.0 (Muenchen, .de, end of April) Some pics of my Maker Faire Ruhr project:  

Schweizer AKW Beznau nahe deutscher Grenze darf wieder ans Netz Drei Jahre nach der Entdeckung von fast 1000 etwaigen Schwachstellen darf Block 1 des Schweizer Atomkraftwerks Beznau unweit der deutschen Grenze wieder ans Netz. Der Betreiber habe detailliert nachgewiesen, dass die Aluminiumoxid-Einschlüsse im Stahl des Reaktordruckbehälters die Sicherheit nicht negativ beeinflussten, teilte die Nuklearaufsichtsbehörde ENSI mit. Beznau 1 ist einer der ältesten kommerziellen Reaktoren der Welt. Zweite Forensikfirma will iOS-11-Unlock besitzen Ein US-Start-up namens Grayshift verspricht einen Unlock für Apples jüngste iPhone-Modelle. Die Firma, die offenbar von ehemaligen Vertragsarbeitern der US-Geheimdienste gegründet wurde, wäre nach Cellebrit aus Israel das zweite Forensikunternehmen, das Unlock-Dienste für iPhone X und Co. Anbietet – gegen mindestens 15.000 US-Dollar. PCs und Notebooks vor Angriffen schützen Wer einen PC oder ein Notebook besser gegen Angriffe schützen will, muss Risiken richtig einschätzen: Die schärfsten Sicherheitsmaßnahmen nutzen nichts, wenn an anderer Stelle Lücken bleiben. Die meisten Angriffe auf Computer erfolgen über unsichere Passwörter, Phishing-Mails, Browser, Anwendungsprogramme und Betriebssysteme. c't erklärt in Ausgabe 6/18, welche Schwachstellen in Hardware und Firmware lauern und wie sich Gefahren eindämmen lassen. Maker-Faire-Saison 2018 beginnt. Im März startet die neue Maker-Faire-Saison mit der dritten Auflage der Maker Faire Ruhr durch. Am 10. und 11. März gibt es wieder Steampunk-Atmosphäre und Experimente zum Nachmachen in der DASA Arbeitswelt Ausstellung in Dortmund. Insgesamt stehen für sieben große Maker-Festivals und fünf Mini Maker Faires die Termine bereits fest, von Kiel über Berlin und Hannover bis nach Wien. Dazu kommen samstägliche Schnuppertage in Buchhandlungen. Alle Maker Faire Termine und weitere aktuellen Nachrichten finden sie auf heise.de

This time, we (or rather I) talk about trouble registering this podcast with iTunes, past and upcoming Maker Faires around the Netherlands, EMF camp in the UK, a resistive 230 Vac load - for the last time, a DIY box to show/control slow digital signals, and an idea for an upcoming project consisting of several types of digital drivers/output in parallel.  

Trashmagination had a table at KIDfest. In this podcast, I share observations about what worked and what didn't, and how it can help me focus my Trashmagination energies going forward. Read more ›

Chris Chuter: @Chris_Chuter Show Notes: 00:47 - Peeple: What is it? Why? 02:59 - Iterations and User Testing 13:32 - Complexity of Installation 17:26 - Device Integration 22:15 - Setup and Installation 25:35 - Laws and Building Codes 26:39 - Getting Started in this Space 31:29 - Ensuring Quality, Integration Testing, and Deployment Pipelines 33:18 - The Manufacturing Process Resources: If This Then That (IFTTT) Transcript: CHARLES: Hello, everybody and welcome to The Frontside Podcast, Episode 82. My name is Charles Lowell, a developer here at the Frontside and your podcast host-in-training. With me is Elrick Ryan. Hello Elrick. ELRICK: Hey, hello. CHARLES: And today, we are going to be continuing our series on the Internet of Things and we have someone on the podcast today who's going to talk to us about the Internet of Things. His name is Chris Chuter and he is the CEO, inventor and founder of Peeple. Hey, Chris. CHRIS: Hey. How is it going? CHARLES: It's gone well. Thanks for coming on the program. Peeple, what is it? Why don't you give us a quick overview of the product? Obviously it pertains to IoT, what is it and how did you become involved with it? Let's delve into that. CHRIS: Yes, sure. Let me give you the elevator short version first then we can dive deeper. Peeple is caller ID for your front door. The idea is when you get a phone call and you don't answer the phone, what happens? It goes to your voicemail. You know someone called you. But today, if someone comes to your house, you have no idea that they came unless you're there. This is the central problem that we solved with Peeple. It's a little device, a hardware device, an Internet of Things device that fits over the peephole in your door in the inside of your house. When someone knocks or doors open, you get a push notification on your phone. You can open up the phone and you can see a live view of your peephole. In a nutshell, Peeple is a smart peephole. CHARLES: Is it more for the case when you're not home at all or do you find the people use it for what you would traditionally use a peephole. CHRIS: It depends on the person. Now, my personal use case is for keeping track of wandering kids and that's actually inspiration for this invention. I have two boys and when one of my boys was three years old, he managed to open the door, walk out, go on to the street and walk down to the end of the street. Now, I live in Austin and I live right off the edge of a very busy street. Now, my kid didn't die or anything like that. It's not a really sad story but a neighbor brought my kid home and it was one of those moments as a parent where you're like, "Oh my God. I'm a terrible parent." But being an inventor and an engineer, I was like, "I'm going to hook something up that just tells me when my door is opened or closed," and it morphed into this invention. We showed it to people at South by Southwest almost three or four years ago. That's when we realized we were on to something that didn't exist. It was just a little camera on the door. CHARLES: Tell me about those first versions. I'm so curious. It sounds like there's a lot of layers of functionality that you've been through, a lot of iterations so I'm curious about that. What's was that zero iteration look like? CHRIS: Version 0 was made in 24 hours. It was a hackathon for... I can't remember the name of it. There was a hackathon group that recently imploded and we won this hackathon. The hackathon thing was to make something... I'm not sure if this is for Internet of Things but we were all making that kind of stuff. I made this little Raspberry Pi demo with a little mini door and I had talked to my wife and this is how I was able to make this invention, to keep track the kid as I was busy doing other stuff but I talked her into giving me 24 hours to make this one thing. Then me and another guy, David we won this hackathon. We were like, "We've got to turn this into a real thing," because one of the awards of the hackathon was you go to Silicon Valley, you show this off and you do all this cool stuff with it. We were like, "We've got to actually turn this into something that's presentable." That was Version 0. It was just a little Raspberry Pi. CHARLES: Now, what were you doing to detect the state of the door? CHRIS: That's the crazy thing. The first version of the device had more sensors on it than the final version. The first version had everything. It had a doorbell, it had a knock sensor, it had a motion, it had a speaker that played Paul McCartney's 'Someone's Knockin' At The Door,' but it had an accelerometer. I threw everything in there the first thing and half of it worked for the hackathon demo but it was good enough to win. This is something that, I guess I could call wisdom now but the real thing I learned is you start with everything and then you narrow and get it more tuned and highly focused and more precise as a device, like the difference between the iPhone and the Samsung phones. One of them is to throw everything into it and then the iPhone is just really specialize into a few things really well. The next three years, we're pulling stuff out. CHARLES: What are some examples of that calling that you're describing where you're saying, "I'm to take this out? I'm going to take this out. I'm going to take that out." CHRIS: We got rid of things like the doorbell and some of the other sensors, mainly because it was just a wiring issue and as well as we wanted to keep track when the door was opened and closed. It didn't make sense to have the speaker on there at the time so we really focused more on the accelerometer and the knock sensor for the first version of Peeple. CHARLES: That is not the final version. Is it mostly just the accelerometer? What if someone doesn't knock? I assume there's some sort of detection that goes on with the camera. CHRIS: That's the next version. That's something that we've been working on right now, what we're going to be delivering. We have delivered our first, I would say Version 1.0 of Peeple devices to our customers. There's a thousand of these or so in the wild, all around the world and the next version we have added -- and I guess this my first real announcement of this -- a motion detection module. It's not a camera-based. It's more or less magic and it just works through the door. That's the most I'm going to say on it right now because we're probably the first hardware device that it's actually using this technology. ELRICK: That's an excellent pitch. Everyone loves magic. CHRIS: Yes, it's basically magic. It works through the door. ELRICK: As you were going to these iterations, were you doing like user testing to see what users wanted? Or did you internally say, "This doesn't make sense. Let's just take this out." CHRIS: Absolutely. That's the second part of this story. After this hackathon happened, we prepared to go on the road show to go and show it off to Silicon Valley but in the meantime, this hackathon group, I think it was called AngelHack, it imploded. One of their founders made all these disparaging comments about homeless people and what essentially happened is we lost the award. They said, "We're sorry. We can't give you the award," but we had spent about three months fine-tuning, making something pretty and putting a pitch together. I went in and I pitched at a TechCrunch Meetup in Austin and we came in second at that but during that meetup, I met one of the reporters and said, "You really need to talk to these guys in San Francisco called Highway1," so I did. We eventually ended up moving to San Francisco. Now, the reason I mentioned that to answer your question is they understand this idea of user testing, I think better than a lot of people. Even though they were focused on working on hardware and getting an IoT device that works out there, they were drilling it into our heads is, "You have to get this in people's homes now. I don't care how bad it is. I don't care if you have to hire people, to sit at a peephole and just look through it and pretend like there are hardware device. You got to do this and you have to find out what the problems are, what works. I want you to look at your biggest fears of this thing and you quash them and you do that before you put any Silicon down," so we did that as best we could. CHARLES: So you did that with the Version 0 and Version 1 devices? CHRIS: Exactly, just a Version 0, I have all these pictures. We put them in about 12 to 20 homes and we have these long extension cords powering this thing because we didn't have the batteries to figure out. We had these huge lag problems. It would take like 30 seconds to a minute before something would happen. We had all these issues but in the end, people were still like, "It had these issues. You couldn't do this," but the fact that I had a door log, a door diary as what we're calling it now, that's something I never had before. That's where your secret sauce is so we ran with that. CHARLES: Yeah. That's the kind of thing it never even occurs to you. CHRIS: Exactly. In the app, or at least the early versions of the app, is you have these versions like a calendar that are like, "Okay, I got 10 visits yesterday. I got 20 visits today. No one came to visit me today. I'm so sad," but I have a calendar of, I think it was May of last year when I got visited by three or four magazine salesman in one week so you could correlate that with, "Did we have any break ins?" or something like that. CHARLES: Yeah, it would be interesting to be able to share that data with your neighborhood or somehow coordinate that. one of things I'm curious about too is you did this user testing you were talking about, doing the wiring and the installation, it's a conversation that always comes up when you're talking about custom hardware because there's always the drive to be small, there's always the drive to be have a small form factor and then you have challenges of power like how do you power this device. How cumbersome is the installation onto someone's door? CHRIS: Yeah, we had it all. That's a big difference, I think between San Francisco or Silicon Valley and other towns is there's this acceptance and there's this readiness to participate in the tech scene. We did a call out for volunteers and we had no problems finding them. They didn't mind us coming to their house and hooking up these big, bulky things and just being real intrusive. The fact that we found these people and they were the key to this early stage of, "Do you become a product or do you not?" We were only there for four months but by the end of this time that we were there, there was this legitimate tangible feeling of we're not a prototype anymore. We're a product and we didn't have a product. It was just prettier but we could see the light at the end of the tunnel. I don't think that would have happened had we not gone through this very painful experience with all these poor people that we inflicted our device on. CHARLES: This actually is fascinating because obviously, you're back in Austin now and I never heard of programs like that, like sign up to have someone come up and test it at some alpha stage prototype in your home. That sounds crazy and yet, it sounds like they were just going out of the woodwork. CHRIS: In San Francisco, it's not a problem. If I put the call out now, I probably have to really like, "Here's an Amazon gift card." I have to start doing a little bit of bribery. ELRICK: I think I would sign up just to see the cool tech. CHRIS: Yeah and those people exist. I think we don't have the means to really find them. That infrastructure already exists. In Silicon Valley, you just go down to Starbucks. CHARLES: There ought to be some sort of meetup for people who want to experiment with very early stage IoT devices here in Austin. Maybe, we'll have to look at it. If that doesn't exist, I would love being a guinea pig. I actually think there is an untapped willingness here but there's just not -- CHRIS: I think you need a critical mass of hardware people and hardware devices that are ready to be put in doors or put in the houses. There's definitely some in there. I have a lot of friends and there are hardware meetups that we go to but this stuff takes so long and it's so hard as hardware is hard. There's that small window of, "We got this little idea of a water sprinkler. Do you think anyone want to try it out?" or something like that and then the moments gone. Then six months later, there's another one. CHARLES: Yeah. I wonder if there's a way to really decrease that iteration cycle so that you can get feedback more quickly. I guess the problem is when you need a physical device, you just needed a physical device. CHRIS: We're talking about the Maker Movement and the MakerClub. If you're part of those, these people are hard to find. People that go to Maker Faires, that's the people you're looking for. CHARLES: Right. Now, transitioning because ultimately your target customer base is not makers, not people who are willing to put up with wires and cabling and people doing protracted installation. What does the kind of 1.0 product look like? Because what I'm curious is what immediately jumps to mind is this thing sounds like it's going to probably consume a lot of power. How do you get the power to that and what are the challenges and what are the tradeoffs that you have to make to try and get that power consumption down or get the installation complexity down? How complex is it today to install? CHRIS: I guess, I'll toot my own horn a little bit but I think we have one of the easiest IoT devices on the planet to install. You can possibly not even need tools. You can use your fingers but the biggest challenge for any IoT device is getting that home network connection. If there's been a few technologies through the years in which they've tried to fix this problem, basically just like self-pairing or things like that, like how Bluetooth can sometimes be really cumbersome. Now imagine that with Wi-Fi, it's the same thing but now you've got a password you've got to throw in there. That's really the only real hiccup with the installation on our device and we tried a few things. We went through about three different Wi-Fi chips before we settled on what we were using now. The first Wi-Fi chip was a TI one, which offered this nice pairing capability but it just didn't work half the time. Then we switched to a Broadcom chip, which was really solid and stable but turned out to be the most expensive component in the whole device so we had to get rid of that. The Wi-Fi issue was something we had to solve early because it goes also toward your power consumption. We have a camera and a Wi-Fi chip and both of those take up to 140 to 200 milliamps of juice when they're on. We had to be really smart of when this thing was going to be on and that's essentially when we went in parallel with the knock accelerometer. This device stays asleep most of the time and that's how we get the many months of battery life out of it. We put a rechargeable battery inside, it only turns on when it needs to and it's just hanging around waiting for an event for the rest of the time. Those were the things we were solving to get the Version 1. CHARLES: Now, it's waiting for some event but in order to receive the event, doesn't the accelerometer need to be on? Or is there some motion detector that --? CHRIS: That's a solved problem. good news was that accelerometers are extremely low power in the nano or picoamps but that's also another reason why the motion detection was going to be a hard problem because that is not, unless you're using what's called a PIR that is not a low power solution. CHARLES: Acronym alert. What is a PIR? CHRIS: It's an infrared proximity detection. That's how almost all motion detection cameras work. They have one hole for the camera and another hole for the PIR. The problem with these are is they don't work well in sunlight, outdoor-light and things like that in one of our use cases so we were kind of stuck. That's why we've recently come up with this new motion solution that doesn't rely on that technology -- the magic solution. CHARLES: All right. When we're going to find out about the magic solution? CHRIS: As soon as I ship this next version because it is being used in a few products but it's not really stateside yet and I want to save my thunder but it's something that I think is really cool. It really is magic. It's just amazing to me that it works. CHARLES: Well, I'm eager to see it. You were talking about Wi-Fi being one of the biggest challenges. That's a perfect segue. The connection to the network for something that we're always curious is discovering a new and interesting device is always a pleasure and then the next thought that almost funnels immediately after is how can I integrate this with other strange and wonderful devices to make something even more wonderful? A question we ask everybody is have you thought about how this might be a participant in an ecosystem so if there were other devices around the home, how would they even talk to the people? How might it offer information to someone looking to, maybe do some custom integration in their home? CHRIS: That's a lot of questions in one. Essentially, there's two ways of looking at it. You can look at it from your customer's perspective, what kind of customer do I think is going to have this or is going to use this the most. Back when we came up with this, there were a lot of do-it-yourself types and If This Then That protocol was out there but we really wanted to focus on something that was incredibly easy to use and didn't require you to program anything. I was really frustrated with the whole idea of Internet of Things because it almost implied that you had to be a programmer to use it. I didn't like that at that time. I've since come around to it because there's all these great tool kits out there. We initially looked at integrating with HomeKit. We thought they'd be perfect but what a lot of consumers don't realize is early HomeKit -- I don't believe it does that anymore -- made you modify your hardware to put in this special Apple hardware. When you're making a device, it is so hard just to get the hardware down. It's so expensive. To add anything or to put anything else in there, it's a huge friction point. It's really something that small startups just can't afford to do. A big Nest or a company like that have no problem but when you're making a one device, this is a big deal so we weren't able to really leverage something like HomeKit for an API. But we do have our own cloud-based API. We're RESTful API but it's just not documented and put out in a way where we want to have people programming it. But the good news is we did leverage several APIs when we were making things like the app and doing things like the push notifications and things like that. Now, it turns out that a lot of the case we used are now integrating with things like Alexa and other device protocols so we essentially get those for free. This whole ecosystem is forming around us. Just most important is to get your device out there because you have a vision for what the device will be used for. But then your customers tell you what the device is really useful for and that's when the real work starts. CHARLES: Right. I guess, it's true you have your first line of customers and I guess the use case what I was thinking of is me being a developer. I'm thinking what products could be built then using this as a component, so to speak. Have you'd given any thought to that or have anyone had approached you to say, "This is amazing. I'd like to build this meta product that integrates that," or is it kind of early days? CHRIS: Early on, that was the approach of the Internet of Things and it merged away from that in my experience. Early on, it was all about building blocks. You got to understand, these are old Zigbee Z-Wave programmers and that was the whole concept. Then it got turned on its head by, "I really have this problem that I need to solve and I don't want to have to make a bunch of building blocks to do this." For attacking it from the other side, like you're saying, building up into pieces, I really recommend you talk to the Twine guys -- super mechanical -- they're here in Austin as well. A year or so before, we came out with Peeple. They put out this device which was exactly what you're talking about. An Internet of Things type hub where you just add in all the pieces and then you integrate with everything. They can better give you a story of how that lifeline goes. CHARLES: Yeah, because it's always something you think about because you've got all these wonderful things. CHRIS: Yeah, some would say, an Internet of Things. CHARLES: Yup, or at least a floor plan. ELRICK: When someone gets a Peeple device, what is the full installation story and set up? What is the walkthrough for that? CHRIS: We have a little video of that. What you essentially do for Peeple when you're installing it on the peephole in your door, you unscrew the peephole. Now, the way Peeple's work is they need to handle doors that are variable width, depending on where you live. There's no real standard. All of the Peeple's work by having a shaft that you screw onto another side so it's basically two pieces. Now, one of those shafts holds this bracket that we include in the package. You screw that onto your door with the peephole holding it to the door, then you turn on the Peeple device and you connect it to your home Wi-Fi and then you're ready to go. That's it. CHARLES: That's the hardware side of the onboarding and then what about the software? How do I go and look at my door diary? CHRIS: You do this during the installation. You go to My.Peeple.io and there's a little button to add your Peeple device. UI-wise, it's one user interface among all the platforms whether your Android, iPhone or on a browser. You just go to that webpage and associate your account to your Peeple devices. You will have to log in. You can log in with Gmail, Facebook or just a regular email. Then you add your device and any time you go back to that page, it will show you only the videos from your device so you have a list of all the events from your Peeple device on that page or in that app. CHARLES: That is interesting. I'm looking at the videos right now online. Although my problem actually is I've got a glass door. CHRIS: Yes, we got you covered as well. CHARLES: You do? CHRIS: Yes. The reason you have a glass door or a peephole and many people don't realize this is it because it's required by law. If you ever plan to have run out your house as a multi-family unit, you have to have a peephole or a window surface to where people can look out. Once we figured that, that's when we realized we were onto something. The first versions of Peeple came with these little adhesive pads that we called gecko skin and this is where we learned a valuable lesson. No matter how sticky you make your stickers, they're not sticky enough. We included three of these little tabs in every device to put on a glass door, if you had glass so the Peeple device would work the same way for glass door, except that you would use a sticker, instead of unscrewing the peephole. The only problem with the stickers were is they were not sticky enough. If there was condensation or a weather event or something like that, these things would fall off so we made a modification. We found better stickers and I mailed those out to all the people. But this is why hardware is hard. You're going to make these mistakes. In all our testing, we didn't find this but of course, once you have a thousand testers, you find a little more. ELRICK: That's interesting that you brought up the laws about the peephole. Were there any particular building codes or anything of that nature that you guys had to be concerned about when having Peeple installed things on their doors that you had to figure out before shipping them out? CHRIS: Not really. The Texas property code is more geared among making landlords do the right thing. In case you're wondering, I think it's Texas Property Code 94-152 that covers this. There must be an external viewable portion for all multi-family units to the front entryway. Now, this is just the Texas law. We had to look this up in a few other states and it turns out there's one in San Francisco, there's one in Virginia but they're all different. But so far, we haven't had any issues with any property codes or building code issues. CHARLES: This has been an almost four-year odyssey for you that you've been on, right? CHRIS: Right. CHARLES: You've been involved in this scene and working with hardware probably for a long time even before that, it sounds like. For people who are just getting into it, because I feel like there's this wave cresting now, where these types of startups and these types of side projects and hobby projects are just starting to enter the mainstream. Do you have any advice for anybody who would want to get into this space? CHRIS: Well, that's a great question. Of course. Now, contrary to what you just stated, I didn't have much of a hardware background. I'm a software guy. I can personally attest to the pains of becoming a hardware guy. Now, the irony of this is I do have a master's degree in electronics engineering but electronic engineering is so huge. It's such a big field that you can spend your entire career not doing much hardware. But I always had the ability to go back and build some circuits but I would say the number one thing, if you're not a hardware guy is go to some of these meetups or get involved in a community and find yourself one, someone who has experience doing hardware because coming from the software room, you're used to this flexibility of changing a few lines of code and being everything changing. Now, when you get a hardware guy onboard and our hardware guy's name is Craig, when he comes to work -- CHARLES: Or gal. CHRIS: Yeah, or gal, of course. When they look at the same problems you're looking at, they're like, "Hold on a second. Let's step back. Let's test this." There's this quantitative slowing which you need to have as hardware because once you build a PCB, a circuit board, you are now stuck with that board for the next month or so because it takes a while to make another one so get that right before you jump around and do all these changes. My first advice would be is get help. There's no shame in going out there and you might be surprised. There are so many people out there that want to join in. If you have a good idea, there's plenty of people who want to contribute. CHARLES: Would you say that there are communities out there like the software communities where you have meetups? Some of the software meetups are just fantastic, where people are so welcoming and they're just so excited to share the information that they themselves are so excited about. CHRIS: Yes and there's the same thing as on the hardware side. You would definitely go to a few hardware meetups, there are several in Austin. There's at least one every week and it's a great chance for people to tell these kinds of stories. This is a maker type community so they welcome these ideas because that's what fuels their enthusiasm. Every time someone is doing something new, they want to hear it. That's the change now. This decade has happened to where you can go out and buy a few modules and make your little device. Then there's the next big step of turning it into going from prototype to hardware but you can get all those kinks out without having to make your own printed circuit boards, without having to have a huge firmware background. Just knowing a little bit of tech and a Raspberry Pi, you can test out your inventions at this early stage without having to invest all this money and these other things. There's never been a better time to do it. I would leave your listeners with is if you got something swirling around your head, get a Pi, get a little Arduino and do it. There's nothing stopping you. CHARLES: Yeah, it's shocking how affordable they are. CHRIS: I don't even touch on China, by the way but that's the next step. CHARLES: That's the great thought that I want to leave everybody with but I actually have more questions so we won't leave everybody with that. We'll keep on going because I want to talk about China and I want to talk about something that was in there. You've touched on it a couple of times when telling your story how you go from this just do it, get it out there, get it into people's homes, just get the Version 0 out, just buy an Arduino, slap together something terrible, that is at least one millionth of the dream that you have and you've taken your first step on that odyssey. That's a very common story in software. The way that we develop software too is have these agile methodologies and these techniques to reinforce them, testing, continuous integration, continuous deployment. How does that play out? A fascinating subject to me personally is how do you do that in the context of hardware. A question that I love to ask is how do you do things like ensure quality? How do you do integration testing? How do you have a deployment pipeline if you've got these Peeple devices out there on tens of thousands of doors globally? How do you push out a bug fix or a feature update? What's the automation around that look like? CHRIS: The over-the-air updates are your friend. If you're going to make a hardware device, I recommend making a Wi-Fi enabled device because then your firmware is not locked, then you can do over-the-air updates. That has been a lifesaver. We've done maybe a dozen software updates to our device to date, sometimes little changes, sometimes big changes. But what happens is any time the Peeple device wakes up, it says, "Hello, server," and the server says, "I got an update. First, let me give you all these images." Give me the code. The devices are constantly upgradable, just like you'd expect with software. Now, with some of these Bluetooth devices, you can't do that. You've got to go out the door being ready to go with no issues. It's a friction point to tell someone, "Your headphones can't work now. You need to plug it into a computer. You need to download this firmware upgrade. You need to update the firmware doing it by hand." That just isn't going to fly in today's consumer market so I would recommend if you can, make your device a hardware Wi-Fi device, get a Wi-Fi module in there and that opens up the world to you on doing a lot of these updates, to answer the last part of your question. CHARLES: You mentioned China, since you're touching on the manufacturing process or just the market over there or --? CHRIS: Yeah, be ready to fully commit. I've been to China, maybe four times now. I have a 10-year visa. It took a while to find the right partner and you've got to be boots on the ground in the factory for a couple of weeks just getting the whole line up. It's a whole another product when you're at the manufacturing stage. You're making all these little test things, they've got to hook up the boards to certain devices, they've got to put the firmware on it, they've got to do these things. It's a whole another job. That's why when you do these Kickstarter. They say, "We're going to be out in three months," and then six months later, "We're still working on it." I have a lot of empathy for this because I've lived it. You think, "I've got everything done. My hardware works. All I have to do is team up with someone to just make it and with them, we'll ship it." There's a whole another level to just a manufacturing piece and you can't really learned. There's no real textbooks to learn this because every factories are different. Our factory is right north of Shenzhen and we talked to some US manufacturers but they just weren't competitive to be in the discussion so you pretty much have to go overseas and then you have to sit down with them and just a little bit of communication difficulties can bring down a whole manufacturing line so it's very important that you're very hands on and you see your product all the way to package. ELRICK: That's interesting. I know of it but I never really thought about it because I was really not in that position. What are some of the higher level of things that you should look out for when evaluating a manufacturing partner? CHRIS: We talked to about a half a dozen before we decided on our manufacturing partner. The big one for me was cultural fit. I talked to some of the big ones like the one that makes the Apple phones, we talked to them for a while and I just found that I would say, "We would like to do this or we need this," and then the next week, they'd be asking a question, "What about this?" and I'm like, "Oh, you didn't understand what I was really asking," so you would lose weeks just by tiny misunderstandings. I found a manufacturing partner that has a subsidiary here in the US and my main contact grew up in the United States but he also goes to China every other week. Having that kind intermediary made everything so much easier. The communication was never an issue. I was able to get things done almost twice as quick with the other manufacturers I was talking to. In the end, they also came up with a great price so it turned out to be a win-win. I would recommend talking to the bigger manufacturers but spend a lot of time on the smaller ones and really figuring out is the communication up to snuff to really make your product. It's huge. CHARLES: What a story. I'm really glad that we got to have you on the podcast, Chris because you have the story that starts from literally slapping a Raspberry Pi and an accelerometer and speaker and apparently a bunch of other things on your front door and with an extension cord and walking a continuous path to where you're flying back and forth between China and Austin to inspect and ensure your assembly line and making a real product. It demonstrates that it can be done by the fact that you have done it so I think it serves as an inspirational case for a lot of people out there who might think that this is something that they might want to do. Or think that they're capable of. Thank you so much for coming and talking about Peeple. Everybody, you can go ahead and check it out. It's Peeple.io, right? CHRIS: That's correct. CHARLES: All right. Also, is there anything else that you'd like to announce other than the magic, which you're going to keep a lid on? CHRIS: Yes, I know I'd appropriately teased everyone about that but you can go to our website. If you go to Shop.Peeple.io, we're taking preorders for this next magical version, the Peeple Version 1.1, I guess I'll call it. I would like to add just before we go is if you're going to endeavor to do something like this, make sure you have a very understanding family because they couldn't have done it without a wife and kids that understood my craziness and allowed me to have just a complete mess of our house for, I guess, for three years now. CHARLES: Thanks again and thanks everybody for listening to this episode. You can get in touch with us on Twitter. We're at @TheFrontside and you can always find us on the web at Frontside.io and there's a contact form and we'd love to hear from you, for any reason whatsoever. Thanks, everybody and we'll talk to you next week.

We welcome special guest Ian Cole this week to recap another amazing Bay Area Maker Faire! Along with Adam, Ian is on the board of Nation of Makers, and organizes maker spaces in Florida. We discuss the culture of maker faires around the country and highlight some of the great things we saw over the weekend.

Philip Steffan, Rebecca Husemann In den Nuller-Jahren ist die Makerszene wie aus dem Nichts entstanden: 2005 stellte der MIT-Professor Neil Gershenfeld in seinem Buch "Fab" die FabLab-Idee vor und der O'Reilly-Verlag brachte das DIY-Magazin "Make" in den Handel. 2006 druckte der entscheidende erste Eigenbau-3D-Drucker RepRap sein erstes Ersatzteil und in San Francisco fand die erste Maker Faire statt. 2007 begann mit dem Modell Diecimila der Aufstieg der Mikrocontroller-Plattform Arduino und auf dem 24C3 stellten Jens Ohlig und Lars Weiler ihre Anleitung vor, wie man einen eigenen Hackerspace gründet. Eine neue Szene ist geboren. Rund zehn Jahre später gibt es in Deutschland über 100 Makerspaces, Hack(er)spaces, FabLabs und ähnliche Räume, in denen Menschen gemeinsam aktiv sind. Es ist sowohl ein Revival der "offenen Werkstatt" mit modernen Werkzeugen als auch eine Rückkehr zum elektronischen Basteln, das seit den 1980er Jahren fast ganz durch Computer und Internet abgelöst war. Wir möchten darüber sprechen, was die Maker und ihre Bewegung ausmacht und welche Ansätze und Ideen sie damals, heute und vielleicht in Zukunft verfolgt. Wie genau die deutsche Makerszene entstanden ist und wie sie sich entwickelt, ist noch erstaunlich unbeleuchtet - wir wollen euch einen Überblick geben. Rebecca ist als Makerin im Stratum 0 in Braunschweig aktiv und hat ihre Bachelorarbeit über die Makerszene in Deutschland geschrieben. Philip wurde vor 10 Jahren vom Arduino-Projekt für das Thema begeistert, ist Redakteur beim deutschen Make-Magazin und organisiert seit 2013 die Maker Faires in Deutschland.

EPISODE 2: THE MAKING IN YOUNGER CLASSROOMS EDITION Hosts: Angie O'Malley, David Hann, Sarah Emerson Angie O'Malley is a STEAM Specialist at Brighton School, a preschool through 8th grade private school in Mountlake Terrace, Washington, United States. Angie began as a technology instructor and worked to develop a comprehensive, integrated STEAM program for elementary and middle school students. Angie helped plan and design the schools new STEAM lab, where she holds weekly classes, before-school programs, and summer camps. Angie received her undergraduate degree from Linfield College and a Masters of Arts in Teaching from Seattle Pacific University. David Hann teaches 8th grade math and 6/7/8th grade Design & Technology at Donview Middle Health & Wellness Academy, a public school in Toronto, Canada. He was the first teacher to pilot a 3D printing program in a Toronto middle school, complementing his existing Design & Technology program in a wood/metal shop. In 2014 and 2015, David and several colleagues collaborated to have 8th grade students build pinball machines using Makey Makey and Scratch for a cross-curricular final project (covering Math, English, Science, History and Geography). He has presented this project at conferences and Maker Faires, including the 2015 World Maker Faire in New York. David is one of the co-founders of the MakerEdTO group, which organizes a summer maker conference for Toronto/Ontario teachers, and facilitates the development of educators maker skills and professional network. He holds two bachelor’s degrees from the University of Toronto, in Education, and in History & Philosophy, and has additional qualification as a Design & Technology specialist teacher. Sarah Emerson is the co-founder of the iSTEAM Lab at Bing Wong Elementary School, a public school in San Bernardino, California, United States. The iSTEAM Lab was founded to inspire students to imagine, innovate and engage in building hope for their futures. Emerson is the school's STEAM program facilitator, primarily teaching mechanical engineering, manufacturing, product innovation, entrepreneurship, and animatronics to students in kindergarten through sixth grade. She also collaborates with her colleagues at the elementary level, as well as the secondary and post-secondary levels, and community partners to design and implement cross-curricular units in which students explore careers in various STEAM industries. Emerson is currently a certification writer for Linked Learning at the elementary level. She holds a bachelor's degree in Chicano studies, a master's degree in education, and a GATE certificate from the University of California, Riverside.

Welcome to Secrets of Organ Playing Podcast #83! http://www.organduo.lt/podcast Today's guests are Lydia Vroegindeweij from the Netherlands, the Dutch organist and founder of OrgelKids and Erin Scheessele from the United States who helps bringing OrgelKids to America with OrgelKids USA. Orgelkids is an educational pipe organ curriculum and kit dreamed up by Dutch organist Lydia Vroegindeweij. Lydia enlisted the help of organ builder Wim Janssen to build the first and only two Orgelkids kits in existence. ​With Orgelkids, young children are empowered to assemble a working two rank, 2-octave pipe organ in under an hour. Orgelkids can be deployed to schools, music festivals, Maker Faires, museums, bringing the King of Instruments to children. See below for how Orgelkids complements AGO's outreach programs. Erin's son Peter is 7 years old and he loves pipe organs. He's an active member of the Eugene Chapter of the American Guild of Organists (AGO). Peter likes to play pipe organs, but he sure would like to be able to build pipe organs, too. A Google search for “pipe organ kit” led Peter to Orgelkids. Peter wrote to Lydia Vroegindeweij, founder of Orgelkids in the Netherlands, asking if she'd be willing to share her schematics for building a kit and for them to bring Orgelkids to the USA. Lydia's prompt reply was an enthusiastic “Ja!” and she expressed joy that her idea of how to bring the pipe organ to children could grow and reach a wider audience. ​Peter is an enthusiastic ambassador for the organ, and operated a lemonade stand in 2014 benefiting the restoration of a local pipe organ. As he is still too young for most of AGO's outreach programming, Peter is eager to bring Orgelkids to his peers. In this conversation we talk about this beautiful idea to bring the pipe organ closer to children. ​Enjoy and share your comments below. ​ And don't forget to help spread the word about the SOP Podcast by sharing it with your organist friends. Thanks for caring. Relevant links: http://orgelkids.nl http://www.orgelkidsusa.org

Robots are just like us. Which is great, because we are perfect and made of metal and can crush everything that annoys us in our titanium alloy claws.

This week Jimmy Diresta, Bob Clagett and David Picciuto talk about Maker Faires, rope and t-shirts.

This week Jimmy Diresta, Bob Clagett and David Picciuto talk about Maker Faires, rope and t-shirts.

This week Jimmy Diresta, Bob Clagett and David Picciuto talk about Maker Faires, rope and t-shirts.

This week Jimmy Diresta, Bob Clagett and David Picciuto talk about Maker Faires, rope and t-shirts.

The Maker movement. For those of you who are unfamiliar with it, this phrase refers to a recent trend towards, well… making things. AdWeek has a pretty solid definition, saying that the maker movement is an umbrella term for independent inventors, designers and tinkerers. It’s a convergence of computer hackers and traditional artisans, and taps into American admiration for self-reliance and building. With the growth of makerspaces in school systems, the Maker movement has also been making its way into K-12 and other educational spaces across the world. Maker Faires across the country attracted an audience of 1.1 million people this year, and at the heart of the Maker movement, there are a few key players driving its growth. Dale Dougherty, Founder of MAKE Magazine and the creator of Maker Faires, is one of those people. And this week, we got some time to sit down with him and hear about what he predicts is next for making in education.

SummaryDale Dougherty was the organizer of the world’s first ever web developers conference, the World Wide Web Wizards Workshop in July of 1993. This was where Tim Berners-Lee and Marc Andreessen first met. Dale is also the man who coined the term “Web 2.0” when he organized the first Web 2.0 Summit. But Dale was also the co-founder of the web’s first ever commercial website, Global Network Navigator, or GNN. Today, Dale is probably best known as the founder of Make Magazine, Maker Faires and the entire Maker Movement. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Introduction [0:48] MakerFaire Science Center Singapore inspiring young makers[5:05] Science Center Singapore Sony Creative Science Award Kids Stop Exploring Nature’s Design DIY.org getting involved in Maker Faires[18:08] Mini Maker Faire Singapore Yarnbombing Agatha Lee Upcycling Workshops at Mini Maker Faire I/O Polling audience questions [24:04] paper circuits squishy circuits zone of proximal development Rapid Fire questions [35:26] The art of tinkering Sustainable Living Lab Strandbeest Theo Jansen Make Instructables DIY.org Hammer Drill IDA Labs Makers Block Festival Doubly Linked List - New releases [38:55] Amazon Fire Phone Google Web Starter Kit Google Web Fundamentals Made with Code Event Loop - Local events [42:10] Red Dot Ruby Conference Makers Block DIYBio Singapore Makers Meetup Makers Block Schedule Mini Maker Faire Singapore Yarnbombing Senja-Cashew CC Bookbinding Workshop at Science Center SSYSF Camp Science Ahoy Program Singapore Science Festival Electric Plug – Connect with Kiruthika! [49:05] Kiruthika’s Facebook Singapore Mini MakerFaire Email Singapore Mini MakerFaire Blog Singapore Science Festival

This episode, The Tieton Maker Faire: Craft and the cross between science fair and country fair. Tech, text, and textile: Nathan Poel http://www.nathanpoel.com John Storlie http://www.yakimanetworking.com Daniel Duford http://www.cumbersomemultiples.com Andy Behrle  http://www.andybehrle.com Curt Rosenkranz  http://www.vikingtek.com Janice Arnold http://www.jafelt.com Mini Maker Faires are locally organized events celebrating arts, crafts, engineering, science projects and the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) mindset. Mighty Tieton is sponsoring the Tieton Mini Maker Faire, the first in Central/Eastern Washington. Learn more about Maker Faires here, http://www.makerfaire.com ReSeen, hosted by Chris Sallquist, is a collection of stories about seeing the world differently and being inspired by writers, artists, architects, actors, directors, musicians, and others from the creative community.  And visit Re-Seen.com to learn more about each of our guests.

“The history of civilization is a story of evolution in our ability to build complex ‘multicellular minds,‘" says Tim O’Reilly, founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media (books, conferences, foo camps, Maker Faires, Make magazine.) Speech allowed us to communicate and coordinate. Writing allowed that coordination to span time and space. Twentieth century mass communications allowed shared information and culture to blanket the world. In the 21st century, memes spread mind to mind in nearly real time. But that's not all. In one breakthrough computer application after another, we see a new kind of man-machine symbiosis. The Google autonomous vehicle turns out not to be just a triumph of artificial intelligence algorithms. The car is guided by the cloud memory of roads driven before by human Google Streetview drivers augmented by powerful and precise new sensors. In the same way, crowd-sourced data from sensor-enabled humans is leading to smarter cities, breakthroughs in healthcare, and new economies. The future belongs not to artificial intelligence, but to collective intelligence.