#461 – An Interview with Jonathan Georgino

Chris Gammell: This is The Amp Hour Podcast. Released October 6th, 2019. Episode 461. An interview with Jonathan Giorgino. Welcome to the Amp Hour. I'm Chris Gammell of Contextual Electronics. I'm Jonathan Giorgino from Binho. Hey, Jonathan, how are you doing? I'm doing great, thanks. Thanks for bringing me on your show today. Hey, no problem. And it's Binho, not Binho, as I was saying wrong beforehand. So what is the genesis of the name? And we'll get into what it is.

Bino: Yeah, sure. So it's actually a Portuguese word. And it's kind of an endearing nickname that was given to me a few years back. And I've kind of casually used that term to refer to any of the personal projects that I've been working on on the side for a couple of years. And this project was born out of the projects I've been working on. And so unfortunately, that difficult to pronounce name has stuck. But it does have the advantage. It's short. And the URL domain name was available. So I think that's what we're going to go forward with. That's great. That's great. And so what is it then? What is Binho? So Binho is a multi-protocol USB host adapter. It can speak I2C, SPY, one wire, Atmel single wire. And UART, of course, as well as do some GPIO controls, PWM, whatnot, basically meant to interface your desktop, your laptop computer running Windows, Mac, or Ubuntu to any hardware circuitry that you're working on.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So it's kind of a Portuguese Swiss Army knife.

Bino: Yeah, exactly.

Chris Gammell: That's great. That's great. And so tell me about like, where did the... Well, I guess we'll get into where it came from. But does this exist other places on the internet? I mean, what else is out there when you... If I said tomorrow, like, hey, I really need help, like, getting a SPY device, what would most people usually reach out for until I communicate with that thing?

Bino: That's a fantastic question. And actually, there's a variety of different devices here. And it's kind of like they're on both sides of the spectrum. So for example, you can look at like legacy test equipment type products. There's a few solutions out there. You know, they're $300 or $400. And they're, you know, they're solid. They're robust. But they're a little bit expensive for individual enthusiasts and developers to go about and purchase on their own. And then on the other side of that same spectrum, you've got a lot of the open source projects. You know, there's the bus pirate and a couple other open source boards that are more of like unfinished products, but are projects to work on that can help you achieve those goals. And so I think those are probably what most people think of when they think of how can they interface, you know, a SPY device to their computer. But what we're trying to do with Bino is kind of put something that's right in the middle of that spectrum, where it's, you know, it's not a project, it's a polished product, but it's still affordable to most, you know, casual developers.

Chris Gammell: I was going to say, like, so when I used to do testing on like, I was just like trying to poke at like different ADCs or something like that I was playing with. I'd just throw an Arduino at it, but it was still, it was pretty chonky. You know, it was like, everything was back on the serial terminal. Everything was like, not, not great. It was just, you know, it was a lot of bit banging in Arduino and bit banging, you know, even lower level. And it's just, it's not that friendly.

Bino: Right. I know. I know exactly what you're saying, because this is basically the start of the code base for this product, where all these one-off tools that I wrote, where I wanted to interface a new device or sensor to my computer. And so I end up, you know, pulling Arduino, write some basic firmware that can just bridge that sensor to a UART terminal and get it up and running from my computer. And so after having, you know, reinvented that wheel multiple times, my code base became more and more robust and generic. And eventually I just, I kept merging more functionality into it. And that's eventually what grew into this product over several years.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. And so what was the, what was the, the thing that made you, what was the straw that broke the camel's back in this case? Like what was like, oh, okay, now it's a product. What were you using all these scripts for in the first place, I guess?

Bino: So I was using some of the legacy type adapters in my, my job at Wonder Workshop actually to do production line programming of spy flash memory chips. And we had to, you know, pretty much invest in, in getting tens of these for our factory floor production line. And it just pained me that at that price point and how difficult they were to use, how difficult they were to get our factory up and running with them. Like, I just couldn't believe that there wasn't a better solution available for this. And like, I kept telling myself, you know, if I had free time, I would totally try to make this better. And then I ended up finding myself, you know, by one way or another, enough free time to make that happen. And so I, you know, I got to the point where like, well, I think this is polished up, you know, pretty, pretty well, I'd like to turn this into a product. And so then I kind of focused on like, how do I turn this, you know, code base into an actual hardware product? So I, I reached out to some contacts, you know, on, on Alibaba that I found that could do machined aluminum enclosures and, you know, just kind of like put all the pieces together to turn it into, you know, now it's not just a bare circuit board. It's actually a finished product.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. And I definitely want to dig under the hood later in the show. But before we do that, let's dig a little bit back in your past as well. So, so how did you kind of get to the point of working for Wonder Workshop? Like what's your, what's your work history? What did you, what was your past like?

Bino: Yeah, sure. So I would say like my, my electrical engineering career started out with a just shy of two years spent at a general electric. They have a small facility in my rural hometown and in Pennsylvania that mostly focused on doing automotive sensors and thermistors. So I worked there for two years as a design engineer and, you know, it was a great experience. But at the end of the day, I realized that I didn't want to spend my career, you know, in a dinosaur like general electric. I wanted to do something, you know, more, more exciting, exhilarating with an opportunity to climb the ladder much faster and just, you know, really get my hands dirty on stuff. So while I was working there, we were actually working on a product that was using the CAN protocol for industrial machinery. Like think, you know, the Caterpillar dump trucks that are working in, in mines. And so as part of that development process, I actually purchased a Celiere logic analyzer. We needed to debug our CAN interface. I found that tool. It was awesome. I was so excited to actually use that to debug the project. I spent some time on their website and saw they were hiring. And so I, I shot off an email to, to Mark and Joe Garrison over in, you know, they were in San Francisco at the time. I'm still in Pennsylvania. I'm like, Hey, I love what you're doing. I'd love to get involved. And so, you know, one thing led to another. I ended up moving out to the Bay area to work for them. So that was my first, you know, big leap. I'm out of the tech dinosaur and I'm, I'm in, you know, the place where all the hardware happens.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. When we know Mark and Joe here, we've had him on the show and as people can go back and listen to that episode, I don't even know what it was in the 200s. Something in the 200s. I'll link that. Yeah. I'll, I'll, I'll link that in the show notes as well, but that's great. That's great. So, Celia, you switched from this, this dinosaur giant GE thing to a startup. What was that? What was that shift like for you?

Bino: Yeah. I mean, that's, which was, you know, extremely noticeable. I went from being, you know, uh, entry-level design engineer at GE where, you know, my responsibilities were very limited in my ability to make, you know, big decisions were, were next to nothing. Um, and then at Celia, you know, the development team was basically, uh, Joe, his brother, Mark and myself. Um, and we were, you know, designing everything, deciding everything, um, and, you know, moving quickly. And that was just incredible to be, you know, so close to every decision that affected the business. Um, and for me, you know, I'm coming to San Francisco from a very rural place in Pennsylvania. So just the whole atmosphere and, and the, the change that comes along with that was incredible.

Chris Gammell: Hit the big city, huh?

Bino: Absolutely.

Chris Gammell: And we, it was that when you guys were in San Francisco proper versus, cause eventually I know they moved to South San Francisco, I think.

Bino: That's correct. At this time they were still in San Francisco proper with an office, uh, near the, uh, location of Candlestick Park.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, that's, that's, that's quite a shift. And what was that time timeframe as well? Cause I mean, San Francisco has changed a lot, even just the past five years. Um, let alone. Right. Right. Yeah.

Bino: So I, when I moved out here, it was in October, 2012.

Chris Gammell: Seven plus years ago. Hopefully you bought a house then, and you're just cashing in on all the craziness that's happening there now. Yeah. I wish I could tell you that were true. Yeah. I know. It doesn't always work out like that. You know, like new engineers don't get to just come in and buy a house. It's, it's unfortunate, but. That's, that's right. You gotta, you gotta, you know, pay your dues. Yeah, exactly.

Bino: So what, what kind of work were you doing at Salier? Okay. So at Salier, um, I was working with Joe and Mark to design the next generation logic devices, which are basically what they're selling on their website. Now the, the logic eight and the logic pro eight and pro 16. Oh, great. So we work with them. Uh, Joe was pretty involved in the schematic design. I would take that, pull that into Altium. I did all the board layouts for those products. Um, and also help, you know, getting everything ready for manufacturing component selection and, and working with our, our CM to, to get those products into production.

Chris Gammell: It's interesting because it's kind of a similar, like what's your work with Bino now, and then kind of looking at the Salier as well. It's like these web, web-based things with, you know, lower cost hardware, but accessible, um, you know, opens up kind of the electronic spectrum to, to more people. And so what was that? How did, how did that experience then kind of color your, your current experience?

Bino: Absolutely. My influence from, from my experience with Joe and Mark at Salier is very pronounced. Um, their mentality of approach to like, you know, just customer service and designing a hardware product. That's, you know, just a pleasure to use in the focus on, you know, making it easy and simple to understand and, you know, not hanging on to the legacy type feel of test equipment with knobs and dials, but going to a, you know, a type of, uh, progressive and more intuitive user interface without holding on to what people's expectations are. Um, all that has really influenced me in particularly in like how they operate, even their, their business model of, you know, a reasonable price point, you know, student discounts, you know, making it accessible to anybody that really wants to use the product. They can find a way to get their hands on it at a price point they can afford. And so that whole approach to, to making a business like that is, is really influenced nearly all of my decisions in doing this. It was a truly eyeopening experience to be able to sit in the backseat and kind of watch how Mark and Joe drove that business.

Chris Gammell: I definitely want to talk about the software side of things too, because I can imagine, you know, when using lots of different protocols too, we'll definitely get into like how the software interacts with this. Cause I think that would be a big, a big issue with what you're, you're working on now. Yeah, absolutely. So what is, uh, what, what was after that then?

Bino: So after the, the two years I spent at Salee, um, again, I was a excellent opportunity to, to move on and find my, my next adventure. Salee, you know, the products had just gone into production and like most small hardware companies, you know, they're cash strapped. Um, and so the reality was that it was probably doing them a favor to, to go find a, you know, a different show to partake in, uh, while they, you know, got through the hardest cast crunch of, of launching their business. I believe, uh, Mark recently, uh, talked to, uh, Limar Freed at Adafruit talking about how, you know, they tried to do their own in-house manufacturing for it. Um, and, you know, they had to deal with the upfront costs of, of, you know, building a few thousand devices with, you know, very limited working capital. Um, so Mark's very candidly speaking about how that almost sunk the company. Uh, so that was an interesting point where I, you know, look for my next adventure and that's when I landed at a company called Wonder Workshop. Um, and I've been working, uh, for them for, for several years on and off actually, um, which is a interesting story in and of itself. Um, but there I work on, uh, STEM connected, uh, Bluetooth connected educational robots. That's meant to teach computer science concepts to elementary school children.

Chris Gammell: We've seen a, we talked about on the show, at least there's been a bunch of, uh, commercial, I guess not commercial, but like, uh, consumer level robots that have kind of gone under. And it sounds like though, uh, Wonder Workshop still, still kicking. So like, is it because of the space that it's in or, or like, what, what was the, what was the differentiation there versus other, other robotics, like plastic robotics type things?

Bino: No, you're, you're, you're spot on right now. It's, it's a very interesting time to be in like the consumer robotics industry. As you've seen, you know, Anki has unfortunately not survived the, the cold of winter and, you know, some other companies, there's a lot of mergers as well. Sphero recently acquired little bits. Um, and, and so, yeah, it's, it's a really interesting time to be in this industry right now. But I think one of the big differentiators for Wonder Workshop is, um, even from the very beginning, they were very focused on the educational market. Most of the sales in all of our efforts and energies for sales are directed directly into schools and school districts. Uh, whereas a lot of the other companies in this space initially started selling direct to consumers. Like they wanted to be, you know, a house robotic solution. Um, and only recently have they kind of shifted their focus to try to pursue educational opportunities. Whereas that's something that we've been entrenched in since the beginning of the company.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. And I, when I think about education, I think about like long sales cycle times, like, uh, needing a pretty strong sales force, having a ton of, uh, supporting content and making that part of the sales pitch because teachers want to, you know, start, they don't want to start from scratch. They want to start from like something that's out there.

Bino: That's exactly right. Um, one is the long lead times for sure. You need to be prepared, you know, at least a one year sales cycle to get into the schools. And again, as you mentioned, having a curriculum product that can accompany the robot, um, is a huge differentiator because a lot of the teachers that are tasked with teaching computer science in elementary schools might not actually know how to code or have any experience with, you know, the concepts they're supposed to teach. They're learning them almost alongside their students as these school districts adopt a computer science curriculum. So having that there to help them, you know, give them confidence that they can actually teach it, uh, is huge.

Chris Gammell: I'm, I'm a little bit flabbergasted that kids in elementary school are doing this kind of thing. I mean, is it more like a, uh, engaging way to do logic level things or, or like, what does, what does it actually look like from a, from a, this, the student perspective?

Bino: I believe like, you know, the typical introduction to our robots, um, comes along with, uh, doing simple, uh, applications in Blockly or Scratch. Um, we have those interfaces in our tablets and it's basically, you know, a slow introduction to how does the robot, you know, process your command. So it's like, you know, can you drive, you know, forward five centimeters and then turn right 90 degrees. And then you start introducing things like conditionals, like, you know, if their sensor on the left of the robot detects an obstacle, go around it. Um, and it slowly builds and builds more so that they can start using more and more blocks to tie in more, you know, sensor feedback or other conditional statements. And at the very end, uh, of these lessons is when they get introduced to the concept of a variable.

Chris Gammell: So thinking about like childhood development too, that's tough because like, I know algebra isn't taught till like mid, like mid middle school, I think like seventh or eighth grade because of holding, holding like, uh, parameters in your head is, is tough at younger ages, but maybe that's, maybe that's research has been redone.

Bino: Right. No, you're absolutely right. Like, uh, the concept of variables is very challenging for, for young children. Uh, one of the things that we do in our apps and college students, I have past, past Chris has to cut in and say that college students also had a lot of trouble with it.

Chris Gammell: That's right.

Bino: And then really 30, mid thirties, Chris too, sometimes. You're absolutely right. Um, one of the things that the apps do to kind of abstract that is instead of, you know, calling them variables and, you know, putting all the semantics around it, they actually just refer to them as like colored dots. So it's like, oh, this is like the orange counter. And you're going to see that each time it goes to the loop, uh, uh, the number grows. And so it's kind of like, instead of turning it into this big concept that you need to understand what this concept of a variable is just kind of let them intuitively figure out what the meaning of it is as it happens over time, rather than, you know, present it in a formal matter.

Chris Gammell: I think that's, that's a really good focus too, of like not being formal, just kind of like getting the feel for things too. Cause I imagine like some kind of like coding hardliner being like, no kids need to learn Fortran, some terrible thing like that, you know? That's right. Yeah. Or past Chris too, it would have been like, why aren't they learning C? Come on, man. Uh, yeah. That's right.

Bino: I mean, at the end of the day, they can graduate. Um, we, we have a partnership with, uh, make code. And so if you have our, our Q robot, which is the one for middle school children that you can actually switch between programming and Blockly or programming and in JavaScript. So, you know, it is a pathway into more traditional non-visual coding languages.

Chris Gammell: That's cool. Yeah, that's cool. And yeah. So what are the two, what are the products that are out there right now? And which ones did you work on?

Bino: So right now, so, uh, right now we've got, Dash, Dot, and Q. Dash and Dot are basically the, the bread and butter of the company that, um, we launched back in 2014, uh, to our crowdfunding backers and then the general market in 2015. And so those have been our staples of the elementary school curriculum that we sell directly into schools. And then, uh, recently in 2017, we introduced a robot called Q, um, which has a similar look and feel, um, but the experience is tailored towards middle school children. Um, the apps are a little bit different, present a little bit higher level concepts. Um, and the, the personality is a little less cutesy and a little more, um, try to think what a good word for it is a little more assertive perhaps. Sure.

Chris Gammell: And witty. And, and so I imagine like when I think about like designing, I've never designed for toys or children in general. Uh, but I just imagine robustness is taken to a new level is while still having to hold down costs.

Bino: You hit the nail on the head on that one. So robustness is, is huge for toys. You know, parts can't break off because then a kid could put it in its mouth and choke. Um, so we've got all sorts of different level of compliance testing that we need to go through with these products because our intended user, you know, could be as, as young as, uh, five or six years old. Oh, really? Um, so that's been an interesting learning experience to know, you know, what types of, of things we need to watch out for. Uh, for example, the one thing that really blew my mind when we were going through our initial round of compliance testing, um, was that the blue, uh, blue light coming out of LEDs can actually induce sunburns on the back of your retina. Like, so for example, if you take, uh, the LED, you know, of this product, you have to assume that a child would take it, turn it on full brightness and hold it up right to their eye because that's something a child would do. And so you need to ensure that even when they do that, there's not enough content in the blue wavelength of light frequencies that it could cause that sort of eye problem. Uh, and so it was just mind blowing to realize like that is the level of detail of some of the compliance tests and these products have to go through.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. And is there like a state, there's a standard that you test to, or like you said, compliance testing, is there like a body that regulates that kind of thing?

Bino: Yeah. So most of these tests, uh, come out of like the IEC standards. Um, and then again, there also, it depends on which market you're operating in. Like, uh, Europe has their own set. North America has their own set. Um, a lot of the Asian countries also have their own sets as well. Um, so, you know, it's really, it's a, somebody's full-time job to really, you know, look into this, what, you know, what standards are required for, for selling into certain countries.

Chris Gammell: Huh. And then it's like the product gets marked with, with that, like a IEC certified or whatever it is.

Bino: That's right. So, you know, uh, certain markings get, you know, marked right onto the bottom or the underside of the product, uh, with pad printing or laser marking. And then the rest get, you know, included either on the packaging material or inside that, um, lengthy user's manual filled with warnings and acknowledgements that everybody reads.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Nobody reads.

Speaker ?: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: So again, that's like a whole industry. And we've had people on the show who've done toy testing and similar kind of stuff before, but, um, it's always interesting to hear what the requirements are for individual markets and, and, uh, and, and really end users.

Bino: Yeah, absolutely. No. And like one thing too, you mentioned that I didn't actually address my response was about designing for cost, which, you know, for toys is extremely, you know, cost sensitive market. You need to get these down to, you know, even where, where pennies matter, like the decision over, like, can we add this led can be a deal breaker. So that was a really interesting experience for me as well. Um, we partnered with a very large toy manufacturer in China, um, which can help us, you know, steer our, our component selection process to ensure that we're getting, you know, really good deals off of high volume components that might be used in high volume products that they're making for other customers. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge. Uh-huh. Um, so that was a really interesting insight into what's going on in that industry. Uh, particularly because, um, as I mentioned previously to working at Wonder Workshop, I was at Sale EA, which is like the opposite. Right. FPGA is on board. Sensitive hardware. That's right. That's right. Like just, you know, the, the design, you know, how did it say like the, the design process at Wonder Workshop, it's basically closing the loop on cost. Whereas the design process at Sale EA was, uh, closing the loop on performance. Right. Um, so it was a really interesting, you know, different types of like design thinking that were taking place.

Chris Gammell: I mean, I'm looking at the specs of what's on board too. It looks like there's, you know, motors and accelerometers and stuff like that. What were you kind of tasked with? Were you doing a lot of the hardware there or which pieces were you working on?

Bino: Yeah. So, um, when I started at Wonder Workshop, I was the only electrical engineer up through production, um, which was, uh, an awesome experience. Uh, we thankfully relied on, you know, a number of contractors that helped us really get our design together. Um, but yeah, so I was responsible in getting that all together. Um, dash consists of 12 different PCBA assemblies inside of it. Wow. Um, mostly because like, if you look at the product, it's got a really unique, uh, industrial design where, you know, LEDs and sensors are all installed in different planes at different levels within the enclosure. Um, and so the easiest way to get those all in the right positions, uh, geometrically was to put them on little circuit boards and then run wire harnesses, um, throughout the insides of the product. Uh, so it's really cool. It's, uh, got, you know, three different, uh, IR proximity sensors, which are basically, you know, measuring the reflected, uh, IR content. And then we also have digital IR, which is like the same as in like television remote controls. It can use that to interact with other robots that are in the environment because the typical use case for this is in classrooms. So it's, it's fair to assume that there's a number of these robots in the same environment. Uh, we've got a six axis IMU as well as, you know, we've got encoders on the wheels. The head has a pan tilt axis, which also closes the loop with potentiometers. Um, what else? Sound recording it says. So yeah, um, the sound recording is, is an interesting thing. So sound recording, if you want to take a, an audio file, record it and play it back is actually done from your tablet or your phone. And then the, the file is transferred over Bluetooth and then saved on internal memory. However, the robot does feature three microphones, uh, in a, an array and it can be used for like sound source localization. So they can't be used to actually record you, you know, making noises and then playing it back, but it can give the robot an idea of, Oh, there was a noise like a clap or somebody just, you know, made a loud noise. And then it can, you know, look towards the direction of that sound. This would definitely be a great, like, uh, I would have loved this as a kid. I think, you know, nice, nice. Yeah. I definitely would have as well.

Chris Gammell: I love it now. Right. Right. Exactly. And that's, that's, what's interesting. I mean, so are you like a master of programming? I've never actually heard of the one language you mentioned. It was, uh, a Blockly. What was it? Blockly.

Bino: Okay. So yeah. So Blockly is like a visual programming language. Uh, I believe it's an open source project that came out of Google. Um, and you know, has since kind of proliferated its way through the various companies that are doing STEM based products for children. Um, it helps because you can't connect, you know, the, the, the, the puzzle pieces in Blockly can only connect to other puzzle pieces that make sense in that context. So it kind of limits them from making something that they, you know, wouldn't compile so to speak. So that, I think that that's, that really helps, um, address the otherwise steep learning curve of getting your first program up and running.

Chris Gammell: Of course I'm scrolling down. I'm like, Oh, I wonder if I get this from my nephews. Uh, not, it's not consumer, it's not toy level thing, but it is definitely like educational. It's like 80 bucks, 150 bucks. Uh, so.

Bino: Right. Yeah. Depending on the other, the sale of the day and you know, who's, who's doing a special, the can find a pretty good deal, especially, um, you know, they're on Amazon. So as part of Amazon's promotions throughout the holidays and Black Friday, especially you can get one of these at a pretty good price.

Chris Gammell: I'll definitely keep an eye on that. Uh, that's cool. So, um, so you didn't stay there though. You moved on as people in the Bay area seem to shift around a lot. And it seems like you keep targeting hardware spots where you just, you just go to where the hardware is. It's a good move. I like that. So what was after that? Thanks. Yeah.

Bino: I mean, jumping careers is the easiest way to, to really learn and grow and get exposure to as many different things as possible. So yeah, after, you know, wonder workshop, we got our, our product out in the market, you know, that was their first product or their new startup. Um, and they're really trying to figure out like, what is their business model and you know, what are they going to do next? Um, and unfortunately the hardware roadmap wasn't very well defined and they weren't really sure what they were going to do. Um, so that was a, an ideal time to kind of look for, you know, well, what's my next adventure going to be? So I actually, you know, I, I took the opportunity to, to find some other things. I went to a startup called off grid electric, um, and they're doing basically the same business model that solar city has done for solar in America. They're doing that same type of thing, but for solar, for rural African customers, which have a totally different, you know, power, power needs. Like these are people that probably don't have any grid connection in their house. Um, and their electricity usage each day is limited to like, you know, a hundred, 150 watt hours, not even kilowatts. Um, they're just charging their phones, maybe powering a small TV or a radio in their home. Um, you know, this is the first time that they might have access to light in general. Uh, so from like a, uh, like eye opening experience, uh, that was a fantastic one. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I mean, and what are, what are some of the challenges on the actual hardware side of that too? I mean, I imagine there's inversion and stuff like that, like inverters on board.

Bino: Yeah, actually. So the first round of the product there did not feature any AC. It was strictly a 12 volt DC system. Um, so actually it wasn't very technically challenging. The technical challenges there were getting a supply chain in place to handle electronics, um, in Tanzania, you know, typically, you know, the, the, the supply chain is, you know, everything's built in China, shipped to the U S and then distributed throughout all the logistics services that are here in, you know, in this country. But in Tanzania, they don't necessarily have that. And so we had to get our products shipped from, from China into Tanzania and then do the distribution to these very rural customers. And so that had to be something that was entirely done internally to off grid. There were, you know, there weren't many services available to provide those types of logistic services. We had to train a whole bunch of local people to, you know, how do they install this electrical equipment? How do they service it and maintain it? So I think like those are some of the very interesting parts of that business.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, that's great. That's great. And so does that mean, I mean, it sounds like these other things too, you're kind of going to factories in China and elsewhere. Does that mean you're also doing that here?

Bino: Yeah. So, um, yeah, with, with most of my roles, I've been frequenting China, you know, every, every few months or so for the past five or six years. Um, and when I was working at off grid, I actually got to go to Tanzania. Um, and that was just, uh, an incredible experience both from an engineering standpoint and from, you know, personal growth. Yeah. That's great.

Chris Gammell: I mean, the thing I always think about like with, um, you know, startups that are trying to help low income areas like, like that, that are just, you know, getting, trying to get basics out there. It's just a lot of the skills that I have just don't, they, it's hard to like offer support. Like so many things are like, are such large issues that like knowing electronics is, it seems like it's not that helpful, but in this case, it seems like this is actually a product that could have been helpful.

Bino: You're absolutely right. And like ultimately why I ended up moving on from there was I felt like I wasn't able to do an adequate job for this customer. They don't need somebody sitting in, you know, in San Francisco trying to design a product for them. They need somebody that's there in Tanzania, you know, that understands what their daily routine is like. Like that's who they need to be designing their products for them. And I get, you know, not everybody that is there has the, you know, electronics manufacturing background necessary to do a good job of it. Um, but that's one of the things that I really think that I, I couldn't do well in that particular role.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, that's, it's, uh, it's frustrating. You know, I look at like, I look at like Bill Gates and, but even looking at his, his stuff, like, you know, a lot of their stuff is community outreach and, you know, like hands on, you know, where people really need help. It's usually much more basic levels and it's, it's, uh, it's, it's good that people are able to do that, but it seems like more of a fundraising and, you know, basics kind of thing versus, versus hardware.

Bino: No, it's great that there's, you know, a lot of attention given to that, that it just, you know, need to make sure that it's directed in the ways that are most helpful.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. Well, anything else after that before you, so you said you went back to wonder workshop, was there something in between?

Bino: Yeah. So there was one more stop, um, on that, that track back to wonder workshop. Um, I actually joined a very early stage company at the time it was called pie. Uh, now they're, they've since rebranded and, uh, are named spansive. Um, and so they were working on a wireless charging device. Um, you might be familiar with them in, uh, tech crunch disrupt 2017. Uh, we actually won and that was an awesome experience. Um, however, um, I would say that a lot of the challenges there were related to the timing of Apple's iPhone announcement. So at pie, we were working on a very novel a four WP, which is, uh, um, you know, a different type of wireless charging. Um, we were working on doing that and kind of banking that when Apple announced their new phones, they were going to announce that they've adopted the a four WP wireless power specification, you know, it was going to be perfect. Yeah. Um, and just, I believe what 48 or 72 hours before tech crunch, Apple had announced that they in fact went with the G wireless charging standard. Um, so we had produced a awesome product built on the a four WP spec, which unfortunately was not going to receive market adoption.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Um, so that's too bad. That's a, you know, the bait may building a beautiful beta max player, right?

Bino: Basically. Yeah. Yeah. Fantastic. Yeah. Um, so, I mean, it was a great time working there and that was an incredible product to work on, but you know, they basically had to, you know, make a hard decision as to, you know, were they going to try to fight all the weight that Apple was about to put behind, you know, turning chi into the, you know, everyday most common method of wireless charging, or were, you know, they're going to, you know, just change their plan and go ahead and adopt some sort of chi charging solution as well. So then, you know, they had to figure out what they were going to do. And at the same time, uh, a lot of us on the team, you know, we had developed a lot of expertise in a four WP and people wanted to go in, into, you know, different places where they could use that experience. And so at that time, like there's a fairly large exodus of the engineering team. And that's, you know, that's when wonder workshop happened to reach back out to me and say, Hey, we've got plans for our next robot. Will you come back and work on it? And, and so it worked out quite nicely. Yeah. That's great.

Chris Gammell: Well, that's a, that's a whirlwind tour of the Bay area. And it sounds like, like you said, I mean, you, I really liked what you said too. You said, uh, something like changing careers is the best way to learn and grow. And like, given the sectors you worked in, I mean, you worked in consumer, you worked in education, you worked in low cost, uh, you know, low cost, low, low economic country type stuff as well. You worked in high end test equipment, higher end test equipment. I put salient kind of the middle, you know, but it's definitely, you know, more high end than a lot of the other stuff you're doing too. And, uh, it seems like you had a really, a breadth of experience. And so it's interesting that in all this, that, that Brace EQ brought you back to the Bino and that's kind of where, that's where you are now kind of rolling all this knowledge into one thing.

Bino: Absolutely. Like, I, I feel like I, you know, over the past five or six years here in the Bay area, I got to dabble in a little bit of all the different things. Um, and you know, I certainly, I really liked the consumer electronics, you know, space, uh, you know, the, the keeping an eye on costs and product design, I think is, is somewhat of an art form where you can't just throw every component you want onto a board. Um, so I, I like that. And like with Bino, I'm just, you know, I'm looking for tools that would help me continue to do the things I like doing. And so this was something that I just, I really wanted a tool like this to exist. And so rather than just, you know, wait around and wish for it, I decided I was going to throw some of my, my own, you know, energy and efforts to, to creating something I wanted to use.

Chris Gammell: Actually that, so what you said there is I couldn't throw, you said I couldn't throw everything on the board that I wanted to. I was thinking like, what would be a more, what would be the industry where you would be a little bit even further than like the salier. And I was thinking like high end test equipment, definitely. But then the, the real one would be like, oh, like, like military, you could throw anything on those boards. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Bino: Yeah. I don't, I don't think the budget doesn't, you know, budget is measured in the billions and then overruns it by billions. Right.

Chris Gammell: And I'm sure there's a military contractor out there listening while sitting in their cubicle and they're mad at me saying that. And it's like, come on, you know, we're right. That's right. Like, no, no, no, we couldn't get the highest end FPGA. We had to get, we had to get the second highest. Yeah. So no, it's an, it's an interesting, it, like you said, like I was talking about constraints, like engineers love constraints and, and cost is definitely a very, very interesting one. You know, and it seems like now, you know, I think the constraint you're dealing with now is kind of just working on your own. You know, it's our time is a big constraint, I'm sure too. And so that's kind of what you're, you're dealing with, with the Bino. You know, could you tell me a little bit more about the, you mentioned at the beginning, the, like the, how this was kind of inspired from the factory floor. And I'm, I'm a bit flabbergasted. Like, like I kind of alluded to the beginning too, I'm a little flabbergasted that there isn't anything else out there, like consumer level, they're not consumer level, but like professional level. So does, does that mean that there are some things out there, but they're just really expensive? Like what, what, what was the experience in China?

Bino: Yeah, sure. So, I mean, there are a variety of different solutions out there, but for example, like, you know, to get a good survey of what's available in China, you know, go to AliExpress, Alibaba, type in, you know, host adapter, or, you know, I2C EEPROM programmer, and you're going to see a whole list of somewhat generic looking devices that, you know, that aren't very expensive, but their, their user interface is generally very poor, hard to understand. And, you know, even the tech specs of these products are hard to figure out, you know, what can it even do? And so with the wonder workshop robots, you know, they're preloaded with, you know, hundreds of audio files and sound effects. And so every circuit board coming down the production line needs to have those files flashed into the onboard memory. So that's what we're using these host adapters for. And, you know, we're doing them to the tune of hundreds per day. So we need a tool that's going to be reliable. That's, you know, easy for an operator to, to use without causing much of a problem. And so one of the things that, that have noticed in the solutions that the factory is using, and they're equally kind of frustrated with the lack of options that they find. They're a factory. They don't want to develop their own tools. They just want to buy things that work. But at the same time though, they've got operators that need to use like GUI tools that have, you know, 150 knobs and buttons and things they could click wrong on them. They don't want that available. They just want a button that says, go, green, red, you know, exactly. That's exactly the tool they need. And unfortunately, most of the tools that they're using don't have that. And a lot of them don't even have any sort of API that they could, you know, just put a layer on top of it to abstract that away. So like they asked, you know, what could we help them find to, to make this a successful test station or a programming station? And so, you know, one of the, the, I'd say the most popular one on the market now is our solutions from total phase. And I actually think that they are great. They're very robust, but they're a little bit legacy. You know, they're expensive and they haven't changed for 15 years or so. Um, and so we, we were using those because that's, you know, the best we could find. Um, and, but it was just frustrating to know that like, even though this is the best we can find, it still isn't the experience we wanted to have or that we really felt like, you know, was optimal. So, so that's kind of like where we got in even like the factory too. Um, they were just like desperate. Like, can we come up with something better? Um, and yeah, you know, we kept thinking about it. What could we do? What could we do? And I had these ideas, but you know, when you're in the middle of a product development cycle, that's the last time you want to, you know, really dig your heels in and develop a custom tool for it. Um, so it's kind of.

Chris Gammell: I'll be back in a couple of weeks, guys.

Bino: I just need, I just need some time to figure this thing out real fast. Exactly. So it kind of got put on the back burner, you know, just like I've got a notebook filled with notes of things that I wish a product in the space would do or have.

Chris Gammell: Tell me more about where in the, in the line where this would live to, because you mentioned like programming. Is this like, okay, so you've got a circuit board. You mentioned 12 circuit boards in your current product, but this would be like each of those circuit boards probably has some kind of firmware on board because of a tiny micro. Is that kind of the thinking?

Bino: Yes and no. So of those 12 circuit boards on one main board has, we actually have three microcontrollers on there as long as, as well as, uh, two independent memories. Um, and so that one main circuit board goes through a series of five test stations before it even gets delivered to like the final product assembly line. And each of those five test stations, the first one that flashes code on the first microcontroller and then the next one flashes the code on the next microcontroller and the next one, the third microcontroller. And then it goes to another station, which programs the first spy flash memory. Then it goes to another station that programs the last spy flash memory. And then it's ready to be tested. So it goes to another, you know, a bed of nails fixture that runs through self tests and only then is it ready. Okay. This can be assembled into our, you know, the mechanical plastic parts for the, of the robot.

Chris Gammell: Right. But in each of these cases has an actual bed of nails that hits its necessary test points. Is that, does that really where you're thinking the bean yo would fit in?

Bino: Yes. So in, in, in terms of like the, the factory use case, yes, these would be connected to, um, you know, the computer that's administrating the test and interfaces with the bed of nails fixtures to, to get right on the, you know, the spy bus or the I-squared C bus, or, you know, um, whatever pins you need to interface with to stimulate your, your test and response.

Chris Gammell: Great. And then, okay. So now let's talk about the bean yo itself. So we've kind of painted a picture. We're going to have a board sitting on a bed of nails tester, which people can go and look at, I guess we had a key on the show a couple of years ago talking about that, but there's tons of pictures online as well. They're basically gold pins that touch test pads on the board. Uh, okay. Now the bean yo is plugged into that and it's doing a spy flash. Let's just say that as our example here, how, what does that look like now on the software side? So like from the, what the user, maybe what the user experiences, but then also the engineer setting it up, what do they experience?

Bino: Sure. So I would say the user experience in the factory floor is actually going to be programmatic. You can connect to be no either using our Python libraries so that you can write, you know, integrate that directly with your, your test system that way. Um, or it can be programmed, uh, or sorry, controlled just through any application that can open up a comp port and feed in, you know, plain text ASCII characters. Uh, one of the, the things that I really wanted to emphasize on this product was how it can be easily integrated into any automated testing system that you've got. Like maybe you're using MATLAB, maybe you're using, you know, LabVIEW, maybe you're using Python. I just wanted that flexibility to be there because that was one of the things in the other tools, um, that was relatively hard to do. The ones that had APIs, you almost were limited to, you need to, you know, be able to, uh, link into some DLL. And so it can only run on windows. Windows 98, please. Or you can only, you know, access it from C. Yes. Um, so that was one thing that I intentionally avoided. I wanted this to be able to be, you know, basically you can access your I squared C or spy bus from any automated language that you've got from any computer. So it could be, you know, a single board computer running, you know, Linux on the factory floor. You could do that. It could be, you know, a windows laptop. It could be your Mac book pro. Anything can get access to those buses was really my goal. And so in those situations, like these are just, you know, programmatically controlled. Maybe they've got a basic GUI that you've put on there, or maybe it's just outputting, you know, uh, a pass fail criteria onto the console.

Chris Gammell: You know, thinking about how people hook into things, it's, it's going to, it's going to vary. I've seen actually a lot of people doing the, you know, like a Raspberry Pi on the floor as well. And then, but they, but then they might have to write like a driver on the Raspberry Pi to then talk to things directly. So maybe could you compare and contrast that, um, that setup versus what yours kind of offers?

Bino: Right. So you're exactly alluding to that. Cause like what happens is, you know, people, you know, almost write like a very specific code for a given platform, but then they realize that, oh, they want to move that, you know, somewhere else. So like, for example, within Wunder Workshop, we have some developers running Mac. We have some developers running on windows, you know, whatever their preference is. And depending on which tools they're using, they might only be available for one or the other. Um, but wouldn't it be great then if we had test scripts, um, for the hardware that developers are working on that could run on both platforms independent of whether, you know, which operating system they were running. And so for example, um, we've got a few, you know, test fixtures that are meant to sit on our embedded developers desks. You know, they're really small. They're not quite as robust as what would be in the factory floor, but they have the same equivalent functionality so that developers can, you know, you know, rapidly iterate and improve their, their code base. And so we want those to be in the office and hot swappable between anybody's desk. And so what we can do with that is, um, by making it so generic that it can operate over, you know, a com port that, that gets rid of these net needs to create platform specific solutions and really is generic. And then at the end of the day to say, you've got this working very nicely on your windows machine that, you know, is, uh, you know, high spec. And you want to deploy that to the factory floor on eight different machines, but you want to do it on bare bones stuff. You know, it's still going to work in that situation too, without spending any time to migrate that solution.

Chris Gammell: That's interesting. So what, well, what I was kind of asking though, is like, what about just using a raspberry pie? I mean, like some people are going to just do that and they're gonna be like, oh, well, I can get to spy or I2C or whatever from a raspberry pie. Is there a difference between using that versus using the Bino in addition to that?

Bino: I mean, what the Bino does is, uh, lets you be generic across products or projects, or, you know, it's meant to be, you know, rather than reinvent the wheel every time it's, it's going to be a solution that's there. You know, if you just want something to do in a pinch, then you can grab this. It's ready to go. Whereas, you know, if you're interested in throwing a few hours of your time into a custom solution, uh, for certain projects, that might be the right call to make. And so in that case, you could go ahead and use your raspberry pie and write it right at the driver level.

Chris Gammell: Yep. Yep. Yeah. And I think that is the idea is that it's kind of, you're, you're adding another layer that makes it a little bit easier to interact with things and make it portable like you're talking about. So what is, what's under the hood on this thing? I mean, like, what have you, what have you got going on under there? That's doing all the, the spying and the eyes for I2Cing.

Bino: Right. Yeah. So the electronics, you know, there's, there's no black magic to make a host adapter. We're, we're running on a, uh, uh, at Mel M zero MCU. And we've got a lot of signal protection circuitry, you know, for, for ESD events, uh, inrush current, you know, all those things are protected against, and we've got an RGB led, uh, aside from that, you know, there, there's nothing mind blowing there. Um, that's on the hardware itself. You know, all that is self-contained within a, uh, extruded aluminum enclosure, uh, anodized laser edge, you know, it looks pretty good. Um, and it's got a USB type C connector, um, you know, with, with Mac pushing or with Apple, sorry, pushing, you know, USB type C to being the only connector on a lot of their products. Uh, it makes a lot of sense that you don't want to use dongles to connect to dongles. Um, so we support, you know, the USB type C as well. Um, on the other side of that. So on, on the computer, you know, I mentioned you can programmatically use this device with our Python libraries or from any, you know, uh, language that's capable of opening up a terminal, but we also have a, uh, a GUI application available for windows. Uh, Mac and Linux. It's actually built in Zojo to be cross platform from one single code base. Uh, something that we're, they're really proud of. And that's one of our solutions. Like right now it's a, like we'll call it the alpha release at this point. Uh, we, we got it out there. We're getting some customer feedback on it and how can we really improve it? Um, but that's meant to, for, you know, like if you just want to be three clicks away from interacting with the device, uh, that's the easiest way.

Chris Gammell: And that's a really good point. I mean, the, um, the startup time, I, again, I'm thinking back to my, like, Arduino talking to a spy device, you know, whatever it's like the wires, you know, I had to have the, have the wire set up properly. That's fine, whatever. But, but then it was like, okay, testing the thing, getting some kind of feedback, setting up my serial interface and doing all that stuff. And now it's literally like hook in and then you see, you see stuff on, on the actual software interface right away. Right. I mean, like how would, how would one go the, maybe given the experience that I'm talking about, the talking to a spy ADC, what would you end up like sending, what would the user end up be doing to, to talk to that kind of thing?

Bino: Right. Yeah. So basically, you know, connect, connect the device to your Bino, launch our application, click the tab that says spy or I squared C, depending on which bus you're going to use, you know, configure the clock frequency, uh, in the case of spy, you would select, you know, is it, you know, uh, polarity zero polarity one phase zero phase one, you know, just configure the bus, um, and then go ahead, you know, type into what you want to send, you know, if it's, oh, sorry, you all want to configure if you're using the, the slave select signal or not. Um, and then go ahead and, you know, type how many, you know, bytes you can write it out in hex or decimal, whatever, you know, is more comfortable for you, uh, click transfer. And then you're going to see it send the data. And then if there was a response clocked out of your device, uh, it'll be displayed on the screen, uh, in the text box, same for I squared C, you're just going to configure the bus, go ahead and, you know, give the, the slave device address, uh, give it a payload, click send. Is it read or write? And you'll, you'll get your response.

Chris Gammell: I mean, I guess it sounds like you were kind of targeting the manufacturing side, but how much was the balance between using it for, for like an individual, like a, that I was talking about.

Bino: Right. So actually, so as you said, I started off by thinking this is meant for automated display or automated test fixtures only, but then it was kind of like the, well, how do you know, you know, if my board was even soldered correctly and it would be great on a developer's desk to use this as a tool to, you know, be flexible at doing things without ever writing any code. And so at that point, there's one who decided like, let's throw this together, this desktop application that makes everything as easy as, you know, clicking buttons.

Chris Gammell: On the Python side of things too, I mean, that thing that opens up a lot of other, um, options for people. Uh, when, when you and I had talked before this, I had asked about like the, the great fat as well, which, you know, you'd pointed out as kind of like a targeted more at like a development environment of like making things add on there. But it, it sounded like a kind of a similar way of, of operating and talking to devices as well as, you know, it's Python based. It kind of opens up, opens up more ways to talk to devices directly. Is that, is that a good comparison?

Bino: Absolutely. Spot on. Yeah. Like, uh, devices like the great fit are actually fantastic. If you're planning on using it as like a backbone of something else, like if you want to build, you know, I think they call them neighbors, uh, that stack on top of those. If you want to build, you know, a few sensors and put it right on there, that's awesome. Now you don't need a host adapter. You can interface that, you know, full assembly directly to your computer and again, access it through Python. So I think that that's an awesome solution. Um, just maybe wouldn't be the thing that I would deploy to a factory floor.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Bino: Uh, and why is that? I mean, it's not in an enclosure for, for example, like that's one thing, you know, anybody could drop something on it, short a whole bunch of stuff out. Like when, when they're in the factory floor, you just need something that's absolutely robust and something that also can't really be modified. You don't want operators to play around with anything.

Chris Gammell: That's right. Yeah. So you have wires hanging out, you got things unplugged in. Yeah. So, so you're saying that like, basically because the Binho is basically a, so, and I guess we haven't even described it here. We'll have pictures of course online, but because it's basically a extruded aluminum, I guess you did say that, and then it's just got a, like a 10 pin, uh, header, ribbon cable and header coming out the back. It's basically like, it's either plugged in or it's not. And if it's not, you can tell it's not there. Right.

Bino: Exactly. That it's got a, you know, RGB status led. That's just meant to indicate like, is it live? Is it working? I know it's, it's really meant to be, you know, very simple and just bridging this, this gap.

Chris Gammell: I mean, so tell me more about the, the software side of things as well. So, so now I know I want to write a test fixture, code for test fixture using Python. What does the API look like? Like, what does it take to initialize the thing, open it up, get it, get things talking?

Bino: Sure. So, I mean, you'll, you'll start off by, you know, using a pip to install the, the Binho host adapter package. Um, it's, it's available through there. So, you know, pip install Binho host adapter that pulls it in. You'll start your script off with, you know, an import Binho host adapter. Um, and we also have a utilities library that can help you discover the device. Um, so you, you can go ahead and, um, you know, there's cases where you want to have four or five of these attached to the same computer so that you can be doing it to, you know, five different devices at the same time and like a gangable type of operation. Yeah. Interesting. Um, so that's where the utilities library can really help you out with that. Um, all the devices have a, like a, a unique ID so you can, you know, keep track of which one is which, um, and manage those devices through that library. Um, and then the, the Binho host adapter library itself basically exposes all of the different I squared C, SPI, UART, one wire, atmel single wire. Um, and some of the GPIO functionalities as well, um, are all there. So, um, depending on which one of those you're, you're using, you can go ahead and fire it up. So like if size court C, for example, you would call like, uh, Binho dot begin I2C. And then, uh, you know, you'd give it a device address and then you'd, you'd load it up with a payload and you'd do like end I2C. And when you send that end, you know, you could also have, you know, give it a repeat start bit, or perhaps you're not going to repeat the start bit. So just end the transaction. Um, it'll do that. And then you'll, you can get your response.

Chris Gammell: And I mean, I'm looking at the other common applications you got on your website too. Um, and, and really that it's a, it's a, so it's a two by two by five, one 27. So that's like a, like the SWD cable. I see it sometimes as well. Is that kind of the target for that kind of thing?

Bino: Yeah. Basically just meant to be a slightly lower profile than some of the other solutions out there. Uh, arguably the 0.1, uh, inch is more common. Um, but we wanted something to be, you know, slick in a, in a lean form factor. So we also provide a breakout board to get to the common, you know, 0.1 inch breakouts. Um, but for stuff that's integrated on your board, if you want to put that connector right on your design, uh, it's much more convenient to be able to go to a 1.27 mm pitch header. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I've been putting those on a lot of, I'm kind of back and forth. I've been putting like a tag connects on some boards and then it feels like the 10 pin two by five is easier sometimes. And it's just a little bit like everybody's got one of those programming cables. So it's kind of a little bit nicer. And I've heard, then I've heard people yelling at me about like, oh, you shouldn't put a tag connect on there. Just make your own cables. I'm like, guys, I don't, I don't want to make cables. Yeah.

Bino: I actually, I actually really liked the tag connect system. Uh, it's just, um, it's a little bit, I don't know, for the, the high volume use, the little legs that clip into your board can break off.

Chris Gammell: And if people don't know what that is, they're basically like pogo pins with, uh, with alignment pins on it. And then like, like Jonathan said, those things can break off. And, uh, and it feels like more like I, the thing I like about that is the idea of like being able to troubleshoot in the field. Like I could set, I can put that on every board, whereas I, a 10 pin header after the first 10, I might not be programming. I might not, uh, rather, you know, actually populate them on a lot of boards anymore. And so then aligning with the, you know, I got a problem unit. I want to go and like plug into it and see what's happening or troubleshoot on it. It's like that, that makes a little bit harder. It feels like, I don't know if you've, you've dealt with that in production level or if it's just always bed of nails.

Bino: Right. I mean, we've always been fortunate enough to like to do bed of mail stuff, um, for high volume, it's not really an option to populate, you know, a connector that costs money. Right. It may only be used for debugging. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Are there any, uh, bed of nails tips you have that you've seen over the years? Um, uh, I would say from a design standpoint, get those on your design. Um, the first rev you make your board because when you have to go back, you know, your design is great. Fantastic. And I like, Oh no, I need to squeeze in 20 more test points. You end up rerouting the whole board. And so it's always disappointing. Like when you're late in the game and you need to make that call, like, will I sacrifice hours of labor doing the same thing over again to squeeze in test points? I would advocate, you know, if you think that the signal is at all interesting, put a test point on it from your very first board rev.

Chris Gammell: That's, that is very good advice. Yeah. And then you're just thinking about it too. That's a, you know, like it's just, it's out there and ready to go. Yeah, absolutely. That's great. What else? So what else should we know about the Bino? I mean, like where, where do you hope this sells? I mean, is it mostly production level features you're hoping it sells into?

Bino: Yeah, that's actually a great question. So we recently just kind of like, we did a soft launch, like I'm not doing a big PR or advertising or anything. I actually just want to get this into the hands of some passionate people and get their feedback and see, you know, what are they using it for? What do they like about it? What would they like to see it become? And then take that feedback I get and just keep iterating on it. Like add more features into our software or perhaps expose another layer of API that kind of handles some more things behind the scenes and makes it even easier to perform certain activities like flashing EEPROMs or flash memories. So I really kind of want to see, you know, what do people want to do with this before I really go out and define and say what I want to do with it.

Chris Gammell: And so your target customer is probably design engineers, similar?

Bino: Yeah, I think the two biggest users, actually, let's say three groups. So design engineers, firmware developers, and then manufacturing engineers, I think are probably the three categories of people that would be most interested in a product like this.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, that makes sense. Any thought on like the continuous integration folks that are out there?

Bino: Yeah, absolutely. I think like the continuing, sorry, continuous integration for embedded projects is fantastic. And I hope that it sees more industry adoption. This is something that could be easily integrated with, you know, if you're using Jenkins to auto build your firmware and then auto run tests on it. This is a fantastic tool to enable this.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Bino: Like one of the things that I think that it's very complimentary to your logic analyzer. If you're, you know, you've got your setup so that you can capture a whole bunch of output from your device, but maybe you need another way to stimulate it to be in certain modes. So this is a perfect tool to put your embedded system in a given state or, you know, give it some sort of stimulus. And then you can use your other automated test equipment to capture its response to those modes.

Chris Gammell: Right. And yeah, could you explain the continuous integration thing for people that might not have heard of it before?

Bino: Sure. So continuous integration is basically where you're building your firmware after every little change or every, you know, get commit of code to it rather than, you know, do this big major, you know, change and then do one big compilation of it and then try it out once. Rather than do that, it's like do it piecemeal with every little change. That way, if you've got a, you know, you're introducing a new bug, you catch it immediately before it explodes into something that's big and really difficult to debug.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So in this case, the, this thing would stimulate, like you said, stimulate a test signal and then give you a report of like, Hey, I ran a hundred tests and Chris, that change you just made broke 40 of them. That's about right. Yeah. Yeah. That's a, that's a cool idea too. And I mean, uh, any thoughts about integrating this with, you know, having a tie to test equipment at some point? I mean, is there a cave, I guess you'd have to probably do that on the host side where you're not the host side, but the, the scripting side, you maybe have it tied to other test equipment like you're talking about. Right.

Bino: Right now. I think, um, like for example, there's a lot of other devices that do have Python libraries available. Like I believe a lot of the raggle scopes have a Python interface. Oh, really? The Salyer logic analyzer also has a Python library for automation. So I think that there's a fair number of, of different things available like that. Um, but also, you know, this is one of those things, like if we get some customer feedback that indicates that they'd like to see a particular integration or an easy way to interact with, you know, some other similar devices through like our, our GUI application. That's certainly something that we would consider adding in as a feature.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. That'd be cool. Be cool. How does the, I guess I, I've not seen that on like the raggle. I can imagine the Salyer would do that, but is it like they pop back actual, like, like measured responses. So like you have like a, I don't know, timing or, or a signal height or voltage level or

Bino: something. It's actually a great question. I, I just know of its existence to, to do some automated control over there. I think it's a front end for like the, the visa GPIB type stuff is how they expose it through Python. So I don't think you're necessarily getting back the exact measurements, but I think you're getting it, you know, you can send out a command, uh, you know, trigger a capture, save the file, stuff like that. Got it. Yeah. I risk speaking out of turn. No, no, no. That's fine. So I don't want to say too much.

Chris Gammell: We do that all the time around here. So don't worry, especially when it comes to test equipment, I speak about it. I always say GPIB too. So, you know, I got corrected for that last time I said it. So nice. Yeah, no, that's a good point. And I guess I think about like, like triggering test equipment, like a DMM would just send you back, Hey, the voltage is 2.744 or whatever, you know, like, yeah. So something like that, um, that, that would make sense. Um, but that's a, yeah, it's, it's an interesting idea. I've, I've not, uh, you know, I'm just kind of rebooting my firmware stuff anyways, these days. So I'll have to look into that more. Um, but, uh, that's a, that's a cool idea for continuous integration, stuff like that. Um, and, and not breaking stuff. That's, that's real good. That's real good. Not breaking stuff is actually more challenging than it sounds. Right. Right. So, uh, does this, is this a recursive device? Are you using, are you using the Binho in production to test the Binho? I am. Yeah.

Bino: Right. I feel like it would almost be disingenuous for me to advertise how great this was for manufacturing testing and not use it on my own. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: But how'd you make the first one? That's the real question.

Bino: The chicken or the egg, right? Yeah. Right. Right. Right.

Bino: Right.

Bino: Right. Yeah. Yeah. I've got a few prototypes to make the first one that were hand built in almost embarrassingly. Like I won't show people photos of what those prototypes look like.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. If it's, if it doesn't embarrass you, is it really even a prototype? Come on. That's a good point. Yeah. Yeah.

Bino: Cool. Well, where can, uh, where can people get these things? Sure. So right now they're available on our website, uh, at binho.io. Um, and we're also, you know, starting to talk to, uh, certain distributors to try to get these, you know, in a few other places across the internet as well.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. That's great. And it's B-I-N-H-O for those who did not hear the first half of the show. It's Binho's Portuguese word. Yes. Yeah. So thank you for pointing that out. Yeah. That's great. And so what, uh, what are they costs and, uh, and, uh, other different versions?

Bino: So right now there's just one version. It's $149 and it comes with the USB cable, um, a breakout board to go to, you know, 0.1 inch, uh, breakout. Um, and it comes in a little case. There's also some accessories available. For example, if you've got one of those legacy devices that I've talked about and you'd like to adapt its connector and pin out to the Binho, uh, those are available as accessories as well as, um, SparkFun has recently introduced like the, the quick line of I-squared C devices. Um, so I've got a breakout board that easily interfaces those, uh, with the Binho host adapter as well.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. That's a good way to, I like the quick line. And it's interesting how to, how to interface with that, but in that case, you'd still be plugging into a, you know, Arduino or similar style thing and then talking over the I-squared C from that. So this is a new way to get to, get to sensors real fast.

Bino: Absolutely. Like that's one of the things that we're working on right now actually is, uh, SparkFun released their quick circuit Python, uh, type libraries. And so we're actually running a driver for that, for the Binho. Um, so that now you can use those same Python libraries without any modifications from your, you know, your desktop, your windows, your Mac, your, your Linux PC, uh, and just interact with your sensors directly there. And then later you can deploy it to your Raspberry Pi or one of the circuit Python based embedded boards without any coaching.

Chris Gammell: That's great. Yeah. And that really, that helps speed things up, um, for sure. Well, Jonathan, thank you for coming on and talk about this. Where can people, where can people find you, you personally online instead of just the Binho?

Bino: Yeah, absolutely. So personally online, my, my personal website is collecting spiderwebs at jonathangeorgino.com. Uh, check that out. Um, you can also reach me on LinkedIn. Great.

Chris Gammell: Okay. Well, that's great. And, uh, thanks for being on the show and telling us about Binho. I appreciate it.

Bino: Absolutely. Thanks so much for having me, Chris. It was a pleasure speaking with you.

Chris Gammell: Same. We'll talk to you soon.

Bino: Sounds good.