Video Going Beyond the 'Stock' Arduino with Justin Mclean (Video) 12
Slashdot: Justin, you talked at Apache Con about basically the state of the art if you are making your own projects with electronics with circuit boards. Can you talk a little bit about what is the state of the art and how is it changing?
Justin Mclean: Yeah, so my talk was on open source hardware and sort of the intersection of how hardware and software are sort of merging together. And it’s becoming much, much easier to actually make your own hardware and you can manufacture stuff in very small volumes, very cheaply. For example, one of the platforms that is good for open source hardware is the Arduino platform, this is Arduino prototype board that I have here.
Slashdot: And these have been around now for a decade
Justin McLean: This is yeah, that has 10th birthday four or five months ago, so yeah, they’ve actually been around a lot longer than you think, and they’re getting cheaper and cheaper all the time. And they’re really simple and easy to use, it used to be that hardware was hard, it took a lot of effort to reprogram the chips on them, you had to code in low level machine code, but these days there are high level languages you can use and there’s lots and lots of community out there that can help you.
Slashdot: And what you just picked up is a full size Arduino
Justin McLean: Yeah, that’s a full size one, but you can get
Slashdot: But talk to us the way that Arduino has been shrinking over the years.
Justin McLean: Yeah, because the Arduino is open source hardware, anyone can take the plans for it and design their own boards, and so this is sort of a useful device because it’s got a USB port on it, it’s got external power, but if you remove those things you’re going to make it smaller and smaller and smaller till you know you get something to about that size, or even smaller than that.
Slashdot: Is that the micro you just held up, is that the mini.
Justin McLean: That’s the – I can’t remember actually, it’s the mini. Yeah, this is I think the revision 5 of the mini, they keep changing but you can even get things as small as this and I’m not sure if you can see that on the camera but it is a postage size stamp and smaller, so it’s good you can make a original prototype with one of these devices, put it out in a breadboard, and then once you’re happy with it you can use one of the smaller devices and shrink it down and then put it in your whatever the end device happens to be.
Slashdot: So buying an Arduino based system that’s been an option for quite a while now?
Justin McLean: Yeah.
Slashdot: You mentioned some of the things that have actually now made it easy to actually create your circuits and that technology is getting much cheaper as well.
Justin McLean: Yeah, the technology for building circuits is much, much cheaper, here is a board that I’ve actually manufactured myself, it is a chip it’s a very simple status board, it’s just got some lights on it, they can control and connect a web server to this, I could check with your __ you build __ for example.
Slashdot: So what is the process to actually go from a sketch to a having everything in your hand?
Justin McLean: You can go straight from a breadboard all the way to a manufactured project using open source software all the way, it doesn’t have to use any commercial stuff at all, and the process is basically – you first make the prototype on a breadboard, just putting some wires together and so forth, then once you hack it up that works you can use a program I used a thing called Fritzing, which actually has a breadboard view in it, so you just replicate what you’ve done physically, and it’s also got a PCB view on it, and it’s just all drop and drag, just connect all the traces up, it’s really, really simple to use and it’s even got like an auto button in the software. You can also export the files, and get someone else to make them for you and that’s what I did in that case, and the boards are getting cheaper and cheaper to manufacture, so here is a blank board like this, in my case for 10 boards, it cost me $30 including shipping.
Slashdot: And where did you have that made?
Justin McLean: It was – that was done by Hackvana, which is based in Australia, but there are PCB manufacturers based in the U.S. that do some more low cost things.
Slashdot: OSH Park is a famous one, with the nice purple boards.
Justin McLean: They make the nice purple boards. I have got one here.
Slashdot: Is that the same design ______
Justin McLean: That’s the same one yeah,
Slashdot: So you’re at a software conference but you’re talking in large part about hardware, where does the software come in, talk about
Justin McLean: Well, there is still software involved because the chips that are on these boards are programmable, and it’s amazing what you can write in just a few lines of code, these chips aren’t very powerful, these are 16 megahertz, 32 mega memory something along those lines, but you can write a web server from 20 lines of code, and that compiles down to about 12K.
Slashdot: So one of the things that you showed as well in fact the
Justin McLean: The chips, they are also getting smaller and smaller if you can see that.
Slashdot: Well, that’s true.
Justin McLean: So these are functionally equivalent to the chips in the Arduino boards, they are 8028 and just to mention the process to make these boards here takes a couple of weeks, so you send them off and I will come back to you [inaudible]
Slashdot: So _____ it wants to record, so here I will tell it to record as well. Here we go. Alright, let it have it throw up. Just start up with a sentence or two back.
Justin McLean: Yeah, okay. Yeah, I forgot to mention before that these boards here, they take a week or two to show up, you can pay more to get them shipped more quickly to you. And that’s one option, or you can try and make them yourself, one option is actually to use a CNC machine, and actually cut the boards out yourself on copper, CNC machines have gotten small enough and they are desktop size, so they’re portable and they are accurate to the one I’ve got I used to cut this is accurate to 1/10th of a millimeter.
Slashdot: And they have dropped in price a lot as well.
Justin McLean: And they’ve dropped in price as well, this one in question is about two grand, I mean it is still not couple of hundred dollars, but it’s the same as with 3D printers, 3D printers used to cost $40,000 or $50,000 and now they are under $1,000.
Slashdot: What’s the CNC machine that’s used in this case?
Justin McLean: This one I have used is a project one called the Othermill, it’s actually manufactured in San Francisco, it was a Kickstarter project about a year ago. So and it’s – about size of a milk crate.
Slashdot: Now besides CNC what are the other options if you want you want to make things yourself? One thing you mentioned is Fuji films are actually using printing technology.
Justin McLean: Oh, yeah, there is quite a few photocopying devices coming out, these are slightly more expensive at the moment, but you can get a – Fuji has a printer which will print using silver ink on cardboard paper or transparent plastic, and that will actually make a circuit board for you, there is a few other Kickstarter projects and other similar things that I have noticed recently that combine that with a pick and place machine, and actually conductive glue, so that will actually build the whole circuit for you, and they are coming under about the $5,000 mark. So in a few years time we’ll see that’s come down even more, and you’ll be able to make a circuit within half an hour or so that’s a prototype in that.
Slashdot: Besides all the hobby projects that people can make obviously we didn’t see a lot more devices that are sized this way in everything and that’s already showing up.
Justin McLean: Yeah, there is already commercial projects that have happened from this, sometimes the Arduino just uses the prototyping device for example, I am wearing a Pebble watch here, their original prototype for that is actually an Arduino with the guts of a NOKIA phone, so it’s quite amazing what you can just put together and just play around with it and then say, oh ______ actually become a real product one day. And there is a few other products that I know, good examples are the Lockitron, which is like a door lock that you can take with you it fits over the existing lock. You can control it from your phone and unlock it from anywhere in the world. It uses Arduino compatible board inside of it.
Slashdot: With all these devices in ______, talk a little bit about the way they communicate and the protocols that are talking to each other and the openness of those protocols.
Justin McLean: Yeah, this is where it gets complex, because there is a few basic protocols, the Arduino boards in particular come out of the box with Firmata being one of them. But it seems that almost everyone has their own protocol and different devices use different protocols and almost no device will talk to any other device, and that’s one of the problems I see going forward with this and I don’t think there is a near solution to that. The industry doesn’t seem to be coming towards one single protocol, or another protocol, there is a few protocols that have come out, you know, that seem to be useful things like CoApp for example, but I think – I don’t think there is ever going to be one protocol like there is for the high street or the internet.
Slashdot: What about the connecting layer though, is there any promising middleware that does a good job of connecting all these?
Justin McLean: There are some open source projects which are good, Mosquito is definitely one of them, it is publish/subscribe ______ system, and that does a good job for large to very large networks of these types of devices.
Slashdot: What will make this easier, is there, are there any projects that you feel can contribute to that are going to make it easier for all these devices to talk with each other?
Justin McLean: In the short term I really don’t know, it’s hard. There are projects out there, a lot of them are niche, a lot of them are for specific devices.
Slashdot: I guess companies don’t really want to yield their control when it ______
Justin McLean: Yeah, well, you know we got companies like Intel, Microsoft, and then Facebook started making IRT devices and they all want to own that. So there is an incentive there not to have an open protocol, unfortunately.
Slashdot: You have been designing the circuit boards but your background is not in hardware design?
Justin McLean: No. I have no background in electronics whatsoever. This is all self taught, and this goes to show how easy it is to be able to do.
Slashdot: If people want to actually design their own projects where would you suggest they start, to make their own circuit board.
Justin McLean: I would suggest, get an Arduino board, download Fritzing from Fritzing.org, and start playing around with it, given half a day to a day, you will have enough knowledge to be able to make your board.
Slashdot: And your own self taught nature what did you start with, the same thing, did you start with Arduino?
Justin McLean: I sort of fell into it a little earlier than that. The Arduino wasn’t around when I first started playing with this, but there was a product project called Fidgets which was a bit more plug and play. It was a bit more, it was simpler to connect things together and once I had played around with that for a while I thought, now I would like to understand a bit more about the details of this so I found Arduino platform and got more into that.
Slashdot: Are your projects mostly for your own satisfaction, are you trying to manufacture anything of use or is it mostly for the fun of making things light up?
Justin McLean: Mostly for the fun at making things light up. I like blinky lights.
Re: (Score:2)
So, what, you want to use Arduino but draw the line at connecting it to the internet...?
Re: (Score:2)
Did you get lost on the way to Youtube or something?
Really sad. Older PCs are still better at this. (Score:2)
Remember the parallel port?
It was great for learning and even intermediate robotics projects. Each pin was a bit you could simply read and write the binary, hook the wires up to a breadboard with LEDs, control circuits for stepper motors, etc.
Nowadays since everything is fucking serial, you have to have all this extra crap in the way to serialize and de-serialize the data, and modems on each board. An old Pentium III is cheaper (typically free, people throw them away), and with DR-DOS or MS-DOS installed
Re: (Score:1)
Get a Room :-) (Score:1)
Love Interviews like this, but less background noise would have made it easier to follow.
Thanks for the interview though, lots of good info!