#336 – An Interview with Bunnie Huang (2nd)

Chris Gammell: This is The Amp Hour Podcast. Recorded previously, but aired February 16th, 2017. Episode 336. A second interview with Bunny Huang. Welcome to The Amp Hour. I'm Chris Gammell of Contextual Electronics. And I'm Bunny from Studio Kosagi and Chibitronics. Welcome back, Bunny. It's been a long while. It's been four years. It's good to be back. Thanks for having me. Yeah, man. Stretching your wings. Speaking of things that flew away, we are waiting for Dave. He may join in. So we'll see. We may have an errant guest joining in. But as we were talking about before the show, it's always tough, right? Like the time zones, scheduling, you know, like you were talking about working with people stateside in your work as well. I mean, how does that end up manifesting in your work?

Asia: Well, I'm located in Singapore, so it's Asia time. And so basically, I allocate time starting at midnight till about 3 or 4 a.m. for con calls with the United States. So I end up being quite a night owl. I shift very late. So when people ask me for meetings at 8 a.m., I'm like, are you kidding me? I'm up till 4 a.m. half the time trying to do like meetings with people in the United States. It's not going to work over here. Like, let's pick something in the afternoon. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Well, how about culture? I mean, like, does Singapore work on a shift to schedule like that in general? Or is it, you know, just select industries or what?

Asia: No, I would say like, well, I guess it divides upon sort of almost kind of like class lines, right? Like people who have desk jobs will be more very regular, like 9 to 5 people, right? But then when you get into sort of more like retail and sort of like the hawker centers and people who cook, some people, they work, they seem to work 24-7. Like these guys in the noodle shop downstairs, they're there all the time. Right. Like I don't know when they go home. No, I'm like, it's good for me. I want some noodles. It's like, you know, 11 p.m. and they're like there and same woman who's there at noon is down there like she's playing a game on her phone. Like, hey, I want some noodles. She's like, all right. She makes me like favorite noodles and it's good for me. But some people, they just work, you know, nonstop it seems.

Chris Gammell: I mean, I don't know about you. I want my food service workers to also go home and shower and relax at some point too. I don't want to find random stuff on my food, you know, like stuff.

Asia: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, no. But you see these little uncle shops and stuff like here. And some of them just stay open all the time. I don't know. They just, I don't know how that happens. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Hmm. Well, I guess that's family business at its core. Yep. Got to do it. Pretty much. Well, that's good, man. So, let's see. I was going through what we talked about last time. Obviously, we got a lot of your background story and, you know, and I highly recommend people go listen to that. That was a really fun interview. It was show 84. But I guess we've seen you do lots of things in the meantime. If you don't mind maybe catching us up on, I mean, we don't have to go exhaustive list, but like kind of what have you been up to? What's new, man?

Asia: Oh, man. Yeah. It's been interesting. Actually, one of the questions from the Reddit thread was like about a year ago, almost exactly a year ago, I did an interview with Embedded FM. Oh, yeah. And I was actually at that time going through a kind of existential crisis trying to figure out what my next thing was because I just finished up on some big projects. And I think part of, you know, one of the big challenges of, I guess, kind of being an independent is to figure out what's the right thing to work on, what's the most relevant thing. And so there's a period of time where I'm like, I don't know what I should work on, man. Like it's like really hard to know what the next big thing is. And then a lot of times things find you, you find other things. So a couple of things that found me in the past year was I ended up getting connected to Ed Snowden. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Oh, Eddie. You know, steady Eddie.

Asia: Right. And he had a certain particular problem he needs solved and about trying to secure phones against surveillance for, you know, sort of reporters and activists working in very dangerous regions with kind of state level actors who are up against them. So funny you mentioned that. That wasn't. Yes. Anyways, at the time. I know. I know. It was a different regime. Yeah. Right. Right. And that actually does play into some. Anyways. So we ended up sort of working on a project. Last July, we had a big, big presentation on it at the Media Lab at the Forbidden Research Conference. And I continue to work on that. Actually, the parts are still on my desk right now. I'm looking at some of the bits and pieces trying to get a proof of concept prototype together. I showed a small demo of it actually on Adafruit's Ask an Engineer a couple weeks ago. So that would be the best place if you want to see pictures of it. Right. I'll definitely link that in too. Yep. Yeah. Thanks. And also around the same time, I got hooked up. Well, I've been working with the EFF for a long time. But a project on trying to reform Section 1201 of the DMCA finally got started in earnest. So there's a lawsuit against the United States to try and win back some of what I view as like traditional rights for people to, you know, traditional fair use rights that we've always had to be able to manipulate video.

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah.

Asia: And that one also got mentioned a bit in the Adafruit talk. That one I can't talk very much about because it is an active lawsuit. And it's always hazardous for me to like, you know, go on air making statements because anything you say can and will be used against the court of law, blah, blah, blah, that sort of stuff. Oh, man.

Chris Gammell: But the amp hour being played in a courtroom, that would just be – that'd be a feather mark hat.

Asia: I'm trying to avoid that. I mean, I don't want – I get it. I'm just saying. But it's just like, oh, my God. Like, it's just the evidence. It's really tricky, just the whole – anyways. Well, it's funny.

Chris Gammell: You don't have to say anything if it's uncomfortable, you know.

Asia: Well, the irony is on the one end, you've got like this administration in the United States which just doesn't seem to realize that what they say can be used in court. And they're like, no, just read what I wrote in the paper but ignore what I said. Right. And then you have people like me who are like, I really want to talk about the stuff I'm doing to the public. But like, I feel like I'm being held to almost a different standard in some cases. But actually, I don't know. For better or for worse, it seems like things are kind of like squaring up in the judicial branches to sort of like, okay, this is kind of what I expected to have happen when you make statements like this about what you're doing in public, right? And so – Yep. Yep. So, yeah, there's that. I've been spending a lot of time actually working on a project that has grown in terms of importance to me, which is in Chibitronics, this is kind of – it wasn't meant to be a startup but turned into a startup. So, it was a research project that got too big and metastasized and took over my life.

Chris Gammell: And Chibitronics was the circuit stickers, is that right, or other stuff as well?

Asia: That's right. This is circuit stickers. It was originally what it was. Primarily just LEDs, more aimed at sort of like very young people getting them into electronics and so forth. And there's sort of like this – it was very popular and people are like, well, what's next? Like, I want to learn how to code or something like this. And we're like, okay, well, let's try building a microcontroller. And we actually tried four, five different prototypes for teaching microcontroller. Like, we've failed a lot to try to get to the point where we are. And we finally have a version that we feel will, like, A, fill a market niche that doesn't exist. So, we're not, like, just doing, like, another Arduino or Raspberry Pi clone or something like this. We're actually, you know, like, addressing a need, I think, that hasn't been hit. And B, I think that particular need is, like, looking at getting electronics education to be more inclusive so that more people feel it's for them. And if you look at sort of the statistics of the involvement, for example, females in electronics is a very low, I mean, particularly low rate of participation of women. I was looking at, I was just reading through a bunch of papers and looking at statistics, like, lower than math, lower than physics. It's not, it's not like. That's pretty sad. It's like, yeah, it's really tiny. And so, and we looked at a lot of sort of the fundamental issues. And the thing that I sort of, like, point into is sort of driving it is that there's a sort of cult of RTFM that exists in computers and electronics. Like, if you read any Stack Exchange threads or whatever it is, it's always like, well, if you just write the man page, like, come on. Like, you did it, right? Right, right, right. And one of the things that happens is that when you go to college, if you enter, like, an undergraduate class, that cult of RTFM exists right there where you walk in, you're expected to know how to write in C code. Like, that's kind of the baseline. Right. And it's like going to medical school and people are like, well, of course you've done surgery. We're just going to teach you how to do it right. You know, like, of course you have lots of... Come on. Just take out the duodenum. Come on. Everyone's got cadavers at home. Just practice on those before you get to the... I mean, that's kind of like... What the hell is a duodenum? And so that ends up being this weird... Like, there's people who are interested in going to electronics but weren't necessarily encouraged at a young age to sort of play around with it, feel they're very disadvantaged. And because of just the way the biases work on society, there aren't many engineering and construction kids that try to include women. They're all extremely male-focused in terms of their theming and their branding and their marketing. And this very pervasive, you know, goes all the way down to a very, very young age of sort of pushing primarily young men and boys into this field. And so TVtronics tries to create something that actually wants to include both boys and girls. So we're not just pinking it out and be like, yeah, it's for girls, right? It's like, you know, like you will learn genuinely interesting stuff that, you know, you'll find very useful. But we also want to make it so that you don't just have to be worried about semicolons and be a semicolon fanatic to really get into coding. There's other reasons why you might want to write code and describe yourself, express yourself. And it turns out paper electronics is a really good platform for being more inclusive in terms of getting like design aspects and art aspects mixed together with coding. That's wonderful.

Dave Jones: Now, is it more with hardware? Is it like educational kits like this? It's not just about the hardware, right? In fact, you could almost say the hardware is irrelevant. It's more about the documentation and the stuff that goes along with it. Really, the educational material itself, you think?

Asia: That's true. It's definitely a case to be made that the educational material could be structured better to not just focus on, like, it's very, like, traditionally programming has always been like, oh, let's factor prime numbers or let's sort some numbers, right? It's a very, like, math almost starts from a math origin as opposed to like, let's do something genuinely useful to your everyday life. Uh-huh. And if you kind of rewrote that curriculum to be like, let's, you know, like in Arduino was great, let's blink a light. And then all of a sudden people are like, hey, look, mom, I blinked a light. Mom goes, oh, look, hey, it's a blinking light. Like, I suppose, like, hey, mom, I did GCD. And your mom's like, what?

Dave Jones: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Asia: I hope that's not a drug, right? I can remember doing that when I was a kid.

Dave Jones: I just gave up. I, you know, go, hey, mom, hey, dad, check this out. Check what I did on the computer. You know, check what I did here. And they just, like, the blank look on their face. And you learn pretty quick not to bother them anymore with, you know, like, hey, look what I did. You just, you know, didn't bother telling them anymore.

Asia: Yeah. Well, you didn't bother telling anyone.

Dave Jones: You didn't even show it to your friends because your friends wouldn't get it either.

Asia: Oh, yeah. And my friends thought I was such a gork. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, let's get started there with how much of a classic geek ahead did you even survive? But it's, you know, I think that one of the things that we find is that electronics computers have just sort of been packaged in a way that's always been very technical. Like, sort of, you know, because it started as kind of a branch of science, the path that everyone starts on is like, oh, well, let's start with science and math, right? And let's go towards it. And so by actually rethinking electronics in the context of papercraft and particularly building, like, say, greeting cards or origami or something like this, we actually, like, rework at its core as something that is more naturally going to involve a question of design or art, right? Once you start putting this stuff down on paper, you realize, oh, I can also write on the paper. Oh, okay. I can actually document what I'm doing at the same time as I craft my circuit.

Dave Jones: That's true. That's pretty unique, isn't it?

Asia: Yeah. It's very intuitive. And then all of a sudden, I can draw pictures around it. Like, I can actually tell a little story literally with a circuit. And then I can draw on top of it and make, you know, something else happen. And so all of a sudden, you involve a certain aspect of play and expression almost immediately at the ground level. Whereas if you're in a breadboard and you want to do any sort of stuff, it's a little awkward and clumsy for that. And what you find is that you want to create the path of least resistance towards the thing you're trying to accomplish. And so even though we could create curriculum with traditional, yes. Even though you could create curriculum that achieves the same thing using kind of more traditional breadboard and solder and that sort of stuff. We find that in papercraft, it's just a marriage made in heaven. It's very natural to sort of create an inclusive kind of design and engineering curriculum.

Dave Jones: So do people just like get the copper foil tape and actually like the adhesive tape and stick it down and route it around? Or do they follow preset plans or what?

Asia: Both. Like, so we offer printed, you know, you can download like PDFs and print to have where you should put the tape for beginners. Right, yep. But you can also just start with, you know, a blank sheet. I mean, the funny thing is, is like when you use the copper tape, it's very much like doing a circuit board. I actually prototype using this technique quite a bit now. And it's compatible with surface mount. So if I have, I can't do super fine pitch, but if I have like some down to like SOT 23s and that sort of thing.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, that's not bad.

Asia: There's certainly cases where I'm like, I want to just test, you know, this little amplifier. I want to do a little circuit like this. And I just start putting down the copper tape. And you can do two layers by putting a little piece of paper underneath one copper tape and cross you over the other. So I can get multi-layer circuits and so forth. And by the time you're done, you have a very high confidence that your circuit's going to work really well without having to have a circuit board. It's very fluid. It's very interactive. And so, go ahead.

Dave Jones: It's very much like the Radio Shack slash Tandy, you know, 50 in one, 200 in one type kits in that they started off, if you look at the manual for those, they started off with, you would do it diagrammatically first. They would show a picture of the board and where the wires went. And then after about 10 projects, then they would transition into, hey, now we're going to give you a schematic and you've got to figure out, you know, how to do it. Right. Rather than just join the dots now. Hey, you know, this is now you're stepping up, you're leveling up kind of thing.

Asia: Right. Right. Yeah. That's kind of the progression that we're aiming towards here. That's great.

Chris Gammell: Well, that early dopamine hit is really important too, I think. Like the, I mean, we all know about the LED lighting up, but like if you can trace it and see, oh, well, there's a break right there, that's good for troubleshooting. And then if you actually get it to light up too, that's so important for that, that feedback mechanism of keeping people going. I mean.

Asia: Yeah, no, it is. It really is. You have, you have to feel successful and that you can be successful at it. Otherwise, I don't know, you're just going to, it's much easier to send text messages and talk to your friends than it is to design circuits. Right. I think it's a particular problem, I think, amongst the younger generation is so many easy wins. And the world is, is trying, I mean, everyone knows about the dopamine hit. And so the marketing towards young people is all about, you know, getting people to believe that they, they can, like life is, just do this thing and your life is going to be awesome. Right. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Electronics, of course. You should do that and life will be awesome. Yeah. Well, I think it's, that's, that is a, quite the range of things that you're working on right now. I mean, and all of these things that we've talked about, like the, the section 1201, the Snowden stuff, and then Chibitronics, that is, and then, but then you've got all your backlog stuff too. So. Yeah.

Asia: I have, I have other things that I actually don't talk as public, like I have to pay the bills somehow. Oh, right. Right. So. Darn it. So I have, yeah. So I have a couple other, I mean, like actually really genuinely interesting and very exciting projects to me, but, but because of, because those are like, like truly for pay, like I can't just get on radio and blob about. Hey, this is guys confidential IP.

Chris Gammell: Right. Right. Right. And here's why it's not going to work today, but eventually.

Dave Jones: So how did the new, well, the latest two books, not only the guide, the Shenzhen guide, but the, sorry, I forget the new one. What is it? Adventures in.

Asia: The hardware hacker. Hardware hacker. Adventures.

Dave Jones: How have they been selling?

Asia: Well, well, the, the essential guide has been around for a little while. Yeah.

Dave Jones: And you did a crowd funder for that, didn't you? Which was successful.

Asia: That one sold way better than I expected. Like I did, I did some math and I was like, the only reason anyone would buy this is if you had a ticket to Shenzhen. Yeah. Right. Because it's, it's very, very specific knowledge. It's not like you're going to use it in the United States somewhere. Right. It's like, you don't ever need to take it out to go to Radio Shack and be like, uh, I would like a capacitor to show it to the guy in Chinese. And they're like, what? That's not English, man. It's American, though. It might be fun to try, you know? Yeah. Yeah. And so, but, but somehow I managed to sell way more copies than I think there are people going to Shenzhen. It's fine. I mean, yeah, that's great. It definitely made the book worth, worth writing.

Dave Jones: And how much effort did it take to write both of those? Do you have an estimate, like how many months it took you to?

Asia: The essential guide, uh, was, I did it in two major sprints. I kind of took like these kind of, kind of like, not really vacations, but sort of like left Singapore just to focus my, my thoughts. And the first one was to just structure the book and get the table of contents out and, and do it. And then, and then there's sort of this background process of, of translating all the words, creating like this big Excel sheet of everything, um, and then hiring the illustrator and stuff. And then the, the next sprint was just laying the thing out. I mean, there's a lot of putting those bubbles in the right place and getting the pinging and getting everything. That was like a, probably, I would say three or four solid weeks.

Dave Jones: Right.

Asia: Of, of effort to really get that all into like, and of course it's spread out over months, right? Cause I, you know, I just don't have time. I mean, it took, it took that, that took like six to eight months, I think really to get together. Um, the, the hardware hacker book actually, um, is, is so that one, so the essential guide I published myself. So I actually had to do the printing, the sampling, like, uh, I had to go to China and work on the cover and all that sort of stuff.

Dave Jones: I thought you were already based in China. I'm in Singapore. He missed, he missed, he missed part of the conversation, I guess. Yeah. Yeah.

Asia: Yeah. I'm in Singapore. So I'm, I, I fly there. I mean, it's, I fly there often enough. It's not a, it's not an issue to sort of, to work with those guys, but, but there's a lot more effort on my side to get that book out. Um, and that's part of the reason you can only buy on crowd supply is that I'm, I also don't want to deal with the supply chain, right? Yeah. Crowd supply is great at like selling the stuff for me and I don't have to worry about it. So I was like, why don't you sell on Amazon? Why don't you have eBooks? Like, I just, come on. Like I spent months writing this book. I just don't want to spend months selling the book. Exactly. Right. Right.

Chris Gammell: And we, and we've had Josh on the show too. I was surprised. I don't, I don't know if we announced on the, or we talked about it on the show or if I talked to him afterwards, but just the fact that they keep stuff going, that was really interesting to me. Like that, that they, I mean, they keep selling it for you. They support it. Yeah. That is huge.

Asia: I mean, for, for someone who just wants to build stuff, someone who wants to sell your stuff for you, that's huge. You have no idea. Right. It's like, right. Like I, you know, we got to do. Yeah, we do. Yeah. That's true. That's true. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: But yeah, no, that's, that's, that's, that's really nice. And, and someone actually had asked about that too, for the book and all these other things too. I mean, like, what about like support stuff? Like, is it, they're doing like the, I mean, returns is one thing, but then like technical support as well?

Asia: Sorry for, for like Novena.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Asia: Yeah. Crowd supply does, does kind of the front front line technical support and sales stuff too. Of course they, they kick anything really technical up. Like, Hey, I can't configure my bootloader. Okay. That gets kicked up to us or whatever. So we, we create facts and pages, but if someone's like my box and arrive on time or I see some cables missing or I plugged it in and it doesn't turn on, like these sorts of like, you know, basic questions they, they handle, which, which is, which is a big, also a big burden off of our backs as well. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I think a lot of like the Tindy sellers kind of deal with the, the, everything of it, right? They have to deal with the, the, the returns and stuff like that or eBay sellers also, right? You got to do it all. You got to deal with that.

Dave Jones: It's a daily grind, you know? Yeah.

Asia: Yeah. It's a grind. It's so, it's such, it's such a, oh my God.

Dave Jones: Even though like, you know, in the email, I might take a couple of minutes to reply to find someone's tracking number or something like that, but like it, it just like, it kills your flow, you know?

Asia: Yeah. It does. Yeah. It does. I've had to, I've had to sort of restrict the times when I deal with these things. Otherwise, like it just like you're, you're working on something and then all of a sudden you get into this like, you know, customer service returns processing mode and, and, and you, ah. Yep. So.

Chris Gammell: I will, I will remind Dave that he, he has, he has spoken on the show before about how he doesn't want to give up that revenue just so, just so we're historically accurate here on the air power.

Dave Jones: And I don't want to hire local people. I don't want everything to go to China. Blah, blah, blah, blah. Sorry.

Chris Gammell: But I'm just saying that, like, you know, like. Just so we're clear. Just so, you know, we're all friends here. We're all friends here. I just want to get the records straight. Well, you could use crowd supply and they'll take care of that.

Asia: There you go.

Dave Jones: And the jobs go to America, you know. There you go.

Asia: Sure. Or, you know, you can split the work, right? You have jobs in America and jobs wherever you're, you know, it's like, it's fine. Yep. Yep. That's great. So, the Hardware Hacker book was actually, No Starch is the publisher for that. And so, Bill Pollack there and his team had did all the heavy lifting. The illustrations, the production, the cover, the editing. Like, so much effort went into that book. So, like, the amount of effort I spent on that book is way, way, way less. Right. For what is turning out to be, like, just a really beautifully done book. Really well. Yeah, it's great. Like, me having had to do my own book, like, the Essential Guide, like, Soup to Nuts, and then seeing what they did for the Hardware Hacker, I'm like, man, this is why you work with real publishers. Yeah, yeah. They just, they're like, like, when I got the proofs back, they have a guy who just obsesses over, like, how stuff turns out in the half toning for the images. And there's a lot of them in there.

Dave Jones: All the kerning of this font doesn't quite look right. Oh, my God. Yeah.

Asia: And these people are like, like, Bill just hires artistes. These people just like doing this stuff. And these are the things that I hate doing personally because I want to do electronics, not worry about the font kerning. Right. And so, he really did a good job on the production of the book. And so, I'm really excited to see it coming out. I mean, thankfully, that one's, like, my big fear was that he would put all his effort in and he would get, like, no return on it. And thankfully, it seems like so far the pre-sales have been pretty good. And the book hits the shelf, I think, in March or maybe later this month. Oh, it isn't out yet. Yeah, yeah.

Dave Jones: Because they sent me one on the mail bag and I had it on the mail bag. I thought it was, like, and it had just come out.

Chris Gammell: That's also why Bunny's here, Dave. Right. So, another assignment for you.

Dave Jones: Flog the book.

Asia: No, I've, yeah. I think what you got was a pre-print even, probably. Oh, it was. I think you probably got something there. Oh, yes. Yeah.

Dave Jones: The cover was different or something.

Asia: It's like a yellow cover. Yeah, right. That's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I remember. The uncorrected proof is it. Right. Okay.

Chris Gammell: All of Bunny's spelling mistakes.

Asia: Yeah, so when you work with the real publisher, you get stuff like this. Yeah, yeah. I mean, like, what? It's amazing. They turn out the drafts. That's weird. Yeah, of course. That's a computer for it.

Dave Jones: That being said, they do take the majority cut. I mean, they take a massive cut. Oh, that's, you know.

Asia: They earn it. I mean, Jesus. Totally. I know. I see why they take it all. I'm like, oh, my God.

Chris Gammell: So, Bunny, in your words, what should people hope to get out of the book? What are the – I mean, I can read the summaries and stuff like that.

Asia: Yeah, I mean, I think that book is more of sort of – I think, you know, as Bill tried to frame it. I mean, so he's the one who sort of helped put together the table of contents. Like, I would never have the chutzpah to, like, write a book like that or put together a book like that myself. But, yeah, partially because I feel it's a little bit – it's a little too autobiographical. I don't like to write about myself. That's not a thing that I like to do. But, you know, he felt that it would be interesting sort of tell a first-person story about not just, you know, the successes but also the failures of someone trying to, you know, learn about electronics and hardware and find their way in the world. And so it starts out, you know, in Shenzhen. But we kind of look at hardware from all the aspects of making, breaking, law, biology, and sort of thinking about, you know, the social aspects behind it, the challenges in production and managing people, you know, finding partners. And, you know, also the social aspects from the standpoint of, like, sort of the myths that people kind of have about it around legal treatments and, like, you know, the right to own and right to hack and stuff like that. Oh, yeah, right. And so I like that it sort of, like, wasn't just – you know, the problem is it's so – there's this temptation to sort of summarize everything in 140 characters these days. And then you read that tweet and then you're just like, I'm an expert in that thing now because I've learned – I've heard from an expert on this thing and therefore we – you know. And the book, you know, takes the time to dig into all of the sort of, like, angles that I've had to encounter in hardware through my life. And I think it does it pretty well. I like how you framed it all together. I like that you let me indulge a little bit in the biology side as well at the very end. So there's some material in there that just – like, I feel – I actually feel that a biological system is very similar in many ways to an electronic system. And a lot of the principles that you can use in terms of thinking about it and diagnosing it can be applied between the two. And a lot of people ask me, hey, like, what's next and what's going on? You know, Moore's Law is dying and all this sort of stuff. What's next? I say, biology, man. And, like, this is – you've got to understand this stuff. If not, you know, for commercial reasons, just for, like, you need to understand all the bioengineering that's happening out there. We can totally hack our genes and we can, like, you know, reprogram ourselves and we can reprogram our babies and we can, like, reprogram our environment and all this sort of stuff. What does this mean? Like, all of a sudden when we get to talking about the ethics and the society and the impact of all this sort of stuff, and it all sounds very scary. But, hey, we're engineers, right? And we say, hey, you can reprogram your computers, your smartphones, you can hack your smartphones. We're like, oh, yeah, sure. We know how to deal with that, right? It's not a problem. And we should be able to have this level of conversation, I think, with that kind of technology because it's going to be fundamentally changing in our lives. And we just shouldn't – we shouldn't be afraid of it. We should just learn about it and see it as a tool that it is, I think.

Chris Gammell: So what are you doing with bio stuff now? Are you doing, like, sequencing stuff or are you doing hacking on bio stuff?

Asia: Well, I do – so this is one of the projects I can't really – one of the, you know, pays the bills projects. But I did a little sort of wet lab bio stuff for a while just to make sure that I wasn't completely miscalibrated in terms of my understandings about it. Yeah, just like getting your skills up to date and understanding how processes work and stuff. And one of the interesting things and one of the really low-hanging fruits in the area of biology, I think, is that the biologists, because they're trying to reverse engineer a very complex system that has zero documentation, right? They end up essentially sort of being very superstitious about some things that shouldn't matter, like which piece of equipment they use for what protocol. Because, like, you know, who knows? Like, it could have been just, like, the weird quirk in the way that the LED lights up and measures this thing mattered for the experiment. You're just trying to control so many variables that, like, once they create a protocol, they copied exactly. And so lab equipment gets used for years and years and years, passed on generations and generations of protocols that have just been tested in solid. And they don't really update the stuff to, like, modern things. Like, why isn't my biology equipment connected to the Internet and just taking care of a lot of stuff that grad students are doing these days? So there's a lot of opportunity, a lot of low-hanging fruit in terms of, like, automation and modernization of the biology equipment. And the real challenge is not building it and doing it, but getting someone to actually adopt it as a protocol in their lab. And then once someone comes up with a paper saying, hey, we use this piece of equipment and it's fine and other biologists can read it, then all of a sudden it gets more accepted. But that first guy, you know, sort of accepting it and being like, look, if I lose the experiment, I lose $5,000 in reagents, right? Just one experiment or something like this. And, yes, it's very cute that, like, you know, maybe your shaker will, you know, stop shaking at the right time, like you said it is. But if it doesn't, I just lost a crap ton of money in two weeks of an experiment. And so it's really – it's actually very hard to get them over that bump of trying to try this new piece of equipment. Right. So that's kind of the area I'm looking at right now is, like, working with some very specific companies to try and solve problems that they have in a way that they're willing to adopt it and try it and experiment with it. Yeah. That's great. That's really great.

Chris Gammell: I think about that stuff and it seems like – I mean, it kind of sounds like what you're talking about, too, with the variation between equipment. And it's like you almost need to be able to do, like, a gauge R&R, but, like, you're saying that you can't control – like, what we're used to for test stands, you can't really do with bio because – or you can't do it as well with bio because there's just, like you said, so many more variables. That kind of thing.

Asia: Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, every biology experiment, even the – it's funny because, like, you would say, hey, I'm going to swap in this gene into a bacteria. And it's a very well – it's a very well clearly defined protocol. And that's one step out of, like, this huge experiment. You've constructed a test hypothesis about, I don't know, what causes asthma or something like that. That's your whole experiment. But then that one step of putting that gene in, they still call it an experiment, even though it's a well-tested protocol and you do it every single day. And they design it with gauge steps to even see is the bacteria they're starting with good, right? Was it – is it still healthy? Was it contaminated? Do you have – and then they have, like, positive controls and negative controls on even the most basic stuff because, like, any sort of small outside introduction of dirt or noise contamination can throw off their signal. And so it's incredibly difficult. And the thoroughness people have in designing their experiments is actually something that I learn a lot from when I'm trying to reverse engineer systems and think about hardware myself. I'm like, am I being thrown off? Like, you know, what are my assumptions and that sort of stuff? And to see that level of thoroughness, you know, creates a new bar for me when I go to reverse engineer that actually helps me be a better hardware engineer in a way. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I've often said that, like, people like Ben and Jerry and people like just YouTubers that are very experimental, like, using a scientific method of, you know, all the steps of that basically are some of the best engineers to watch. And I'm sure you're also on that list, you know, like, just – but having that defined process and kind of going back and checking assumptions and everything. So – Yeah. That's great. Great. What – well, let's see. So I don't know how to get to this. I'm going to do it very inelegantly. We obviously have a lot of questions here. But the one thing that really intrigued me that we were – I was following along. You did a hack chat last Friday with Hackaday, and you were talking about remixing hardware. And I think this kind of cuts back a little bit to the DMCA stuff. So, you know, tell me what you can or can't talk about with that. But you were talking about remixing hardware and – Yeah. And how it kind of ties into the Gankai phone and stuff like that or all that culture. So what was that about?

Asia: So there's kind of a question about – this tangentially has to do with DMCA stuff. I can talk about this pretty openly because it's more about the philosophy of IP. Sorry. It's okay. I had a little flam in my throat. Biology. Yeah, biology. Yeah. Having gone to China and sort of observing that ecosystem and trying to like actually figure out what's going on. So you see things like, you know, knockoff phones there all the time, right? And I think what the typical consumer sees is someone's copy at a trademark, right? They feel sort of a disgust and revulsion towards this thing because someone's making a bad, low-fidelity copy of something that's very good. But as an engineer, you look and you're like, what? Someone like invested money to – like it's hard to build these things in the first place. You know, like forget the trademark. But they had to like lay out a circuit board. They had to pour an OS. They had to get this whole thing working. They had to make a GSM stack work. They had like crazy amounts of engineering effort goes into these things. And then, yeah, they slap whatever trademark they wanted because they ran out of ideas in terms of like how to make it look, right? Right. And so as an engineer, like, okay, how does this even work that people are, you know, so carelessly, you know, slapping around what these things look like? Like clearly the barrier to making this hardware had to go down way, way, way down before people sort of regard, you know, the design as more of sort of like a meme as opposed to, you know, a thing that you craft, right? Right. And that got me in this whole thread about what I call gongkai, which is sort of like an open source thing, but it's not legally open source. It's when people are – as the West would say, they're stealing things. But if you think about memes, right, cat memes, for example, you take a picture of a cat and you put a funny title on it and people start memeing it. There's – and then other people, when they start spreading them around, they're stealing the picture of the cat, right? Right, because – Stealing your code marks, right? Yeah. No, yeah, well, it's stealing in the same way that gongkai is stealing things in the sense that like every picture, you know, has an inherent copyright to it. Oh, true. If you try to give a talk, like, you know, I have to encounter this all the time for some conferences I do, they're like, can you certify that you have rights to show every picture that you're showing on that slide? Totally. And so one time I wanted to throw some cat memes on the slide. I'm like, who owns the copyright to this meme? You can't find it, no.

Dave Jones: In theory, you can't use it. That's right.

Asia: Yeah. In theory, you can't use it. And I tried looking to – and you look at terms of use of some of these meme generation sites and they're terrible. I mean, they're like this meme generation site owns everything and they own all your data and all this sort of stuff. And people use them all the time. They don't even read it, right? Yeah. And then they don't even acknowledge the original person who took the picture. So you're stealing pictures of cats and they're going viral and people are, like, getting clicks for them and making money selling ads and doing all this sort of stuff with this stolen IP. But no one, like, says, oh, my God, you're stealing cat pictures or whatever it is because they're memes. They're funny. Everyone does it. It's okay. It's so cute. It's unacceptable, right? And I've gotten away with, like, using – like, I have, like, copyright notices and attributions for everything except for the memes in my talk. Right. Because you just can't attribute memes. And people kind of let that slide, right? Oh, that's interesting. Okay. It's true. And so in the same sort of way, like, the Chinese ecosystem works around hardware in that you have phone memes, right? Like, it's so – like, people don't – it's more about the idea that these designs are going viral and that people are adopting your chips. They're using their services. They're buying your molding services. They're buying your chips. They're buying your designs. They're – you know, there's a commercial aspect behind the hardware. And so getting those ideas and getting them to be adopted as quickly as possible and to sell those things is the name of the game. And what you end up with is a very low friction ecosystem all designed around trying to encourage people to remix and share. And so you get phone memes at the end of the day. And so when you go to the market, if you think about – if you go to the Chinese market and see, like, this huge spread of phones with, like, you know, phones themed as, like, little Minions and Hello Kitty and Apple-themed phones. The ones that look like FIFA soccer balls and little Golden Buddhas and, like, you know, cigarette lighters and all this sort of stuff. You're looking at memes. Like, these are all – like, they're not brands or trademarks that people stole. They're taking little snippets of memes and almost doing a satirical ripoff of, like, an iPhone. Like, making it super tiny and making it have an Android and having it have the rounded corners of an iPhone. And if you look at it from that standpoint, it sort of makes a lot more sense, in my opinion. Right. It's not like someone, like, wearing a cape with, like, twirling a mustache.

Dave Jones: Have you seen these new – have you seen these recent things about, like, someone will do a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter or Indiegogo or whatever, and before the campaign's even finished, it's available for sale in the Shenzhen market. Like, they've just beat them to – like, you know, they've just taken the photo and they've taken it to a local shop and gone, make me, you know, a thousand of these and boom.

Asia: Yeah.

Dave Jones: You know?

Asia: Yeah. Well, the interesting thing about that is that – I mean, so I kind of did a little bit of study on the hoverboard phenomenon, right? Oh, yeah. Right. And around the time that the guy who got the patent on the hoverboard filed his patent, the ecosystem Shenzhen was already turning out, like, unicycles, self-balancing unicycles. Yeah, right. And they had electric scooters, electric bikes, and all that sort of stuff. So, essentially, that ecosystem had every single part already in mass production needed to build a self-balancing hoverboard. They just hadn't put it together in that particular combination, right? And so even though, like, the patent claims all this wonderful stuff about these things, like, the prior art was there to show that, like, the ecosystem could build it, right? It's not like someone invested billions of dollars.

Dave Jones: So, therefore, it's defendable in terms of – sorry. They couldn't defend the patent if they wanted to because people had already been doing all that stuff, essentially. It's – yeah.

Asia: Maybe. I'm not going to – I'm not going to render legal opinion on that, right? But there's an argument. Buddy Esquire. There's an argument that – certainly, I think an argument that there's a lot of prior art out there that wasn't even documented in the – you know, you couldn't search for it in the unusual channels. Like, the thing is, prior art has a very specific legal definition in how you're supposed to look for it and all this sort of stuff. You know, and these are in a different jurisdiction. They build stuff in China and blah, blah, blah. And so the guy maybe couldn't very legally get the patent in the United States because the prior art didn't exist in the United States, right? Right, of course. Different legal systems, different areas, right? Whatever it is, right? So there's a whole bunch of complication there. But the point is, is that you have practicing engineers who were experts and had big factories building essentially something, just one left to that product.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Asia: And so when you show them a picture of it, they go like, oh, hey, I don't know why anyone would want one with two wheels because we think – you know, we've always thought the one wheel was better. But if you really think someone will buy like a couple thousand, sure, we'll two-up the line tomorrow. We'll make them for you. You'll be paying me for it. Yep. Have them by the end of the week. And then – yeah, have them by the end of the week. And then Justin Bieber gets on some show with it. And then all of a sudden, like in order for 10,000 or 100,000, you're like, okay, sure, we'll build more of them. No problem, right? You can scale up, right? We're just building electric devices over here. It's a service industry, right. Right, no, because they already have a supply chain to buy like huge amounts of lithium batteries and, you know, motors that have exactly the right torque capacity. And they already have like the lines to do the molding for the – that all existed. It was just a matter of adding the meme to that system. And a lot of the hard engineering work was done. And to some extent, I feel, you know, as an engineer, I'm divided. Like I use the patent and the copyright system to my advantage. And I also, you know, like to be able to participate in this like very fluid idea economy, right? And so what is the best way forward to make sure that you can like leverage the latest greatest ideas but also not be sort of held back? What is the best way forward, Bonnie? That's a great question.

Chris Gammell: You don't want to give us a legal opinion but like honestly, what does it look like in the future? What does IP look like in five years, ten years, China, U.S., anywhere?

Asia: I don't know. That's a very – it's a social question at the end of the day. You know, IP is a social contract, right? Yeah, that's a good point. And the idea originally was that you wanted people to take risk, you know, and you want to reward them for taking the risk and therefore you give them a limited time monopoly for their ideas. And part of the problem is a limited time monopoly started as a few years and now it's like 20 years in technology which is like an eternity, right? I mean like 20 years to have an exclusive right to produce something in electronics is – It's 12 generations of Moore's Law, right? Yeah, I know. Most people listening to the show probably haven't been doing electronics for 20 years. I don't know, right? It's – and it's – you know, I think MP3 is just finally this year coming out of patent. Oh, my God. Right? And it's sort of one of those ridiculous things where like Star Wars is still in their copyright and there's going to be a generation of people who grew up watching Star Wars who will die never being able to remix Star Wars legally, right? It's like you can never own your culture. You can never – like the time scale is so long that the monopolies are essentially perpetual, right?

Chris Gammell: And their new owner is the one who actually made sure of that, wasn't it? Yes, they did.

Dave Jones: Disney are the ones who ironically made – yeah, they actually pushed for those laws and they got it.

Asia: Yeah, yeah. I feel a little sad that I can't own my childhood in a way. You know what I mean? Like I grew up with ideas that are put in my head and I buy into them and then I always kind of – it's more of a – your childhood is a subscription now. It's not really a childhood that you can own. Childhood as a service? Yeah, childhood as a service is sort of what we've gotten into with these sorts of laws. And I don't know. So I – anyways, so maybe I should stop the rant. But I think that –

Dave Jones: You can feel for the engineer though, can't you? Like you can feel for the person who came up with the idea though and put it on Kickstarter or something, can't you? But you've got to shrug your shoulders and go, well, you know, that's just the way the world works.

Asia: I feel for the engineer too. But I feel like – no, but I have to work every day to pay the bills, right? And the problem is this IP ecosystem allows certain select people to not really have to work so much anymore. I mean the engineers – Nathan Mirvold. I mean here's a funny thing. The engineers who probably applied for those patents, they assign their rights immediately to a corporation. Right. Right? Like it's not like the guy whose name is on a patent actually gets any of that money. No. Right? They might get a bonus from the company or something. Yeah, maybe. And then you have these guys on the top of the company who are getting these huge bonus payouts, right? And these shareholders and dividends and like people who are trading the stock of that company essentially gain passive income from this IP, right? And so it's not like the original innovator – like not like those engineers that we're feeling for actually really gaining from it. It's – maybe their 401ks are getting from it. But like it's not that – you know what I mean? I mean there's been a big disconnect between the people who do the work accruing the rights to it and their estates and their companies accruing the benefit of it, right? Yeah. That's a good point.

Dave Jones: So what about the guy in the garage who does their Kickstarter and, you know, they don't have their patent. They hate patents and they – all they want to do is see their Kickstarter through and deliver their product and, you know, before the campaign ends it's available on AliExpress?

Asia: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Well, is that like a shrug your shoulders too bad kind of thing? No, it's not.

Asia: No, it's not a shrug your shoulders too bad. I mean what you observe is like the Kickstarter phenomenon is great for some types of product categories. But when you see that some other ecosystem is like creating those product categories better than one ecosystem is, you don't like – well, we should kill that ecosystem. No, you're like, no, we should use that ecosystem. Right, right, right, right. Like we should probably actually like go there and – Source from those people, yeah. Source from those people. Like it's almost sort of one of those things like if you're a genius at marketing and you can like market your stuff in Kickstarter and then you just turn around and source it from China and then you sell it to the United States, then you're making the market actually. Yes, that's right.

Chris Gammell: And you can build your contract too with your clients or with your backers. It's like, oh, well, you wanted this thing. I proposed this thing. It now exists in the world. You're getting it. Yeah, you get it cheaper, of course. But that's always true. And I think that's kind of it. Here it is. At the end of the day.

Dave Jones: And that's a risk you take when you start a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign is that you're putting it out there. You've instantly advertised that idea. It's free to copy. I mean it's just –

Asia: I mean the thing is is that a lot of people oftentimes do their Kickstarters way too early. Yeah. Is one of the problems. And so the fact that they get – so people will come up with a really good, clever idea which solves a problem in a way that someone hadn't seen before and that's great. But they have no idea how to do injection molding or electronics design. And I get these emails every now and from panic staffs of Kickstarters like, help, we do this Kickstarter. And we thought it would be easy. And we have like no idea. We have to hire 20 people to do this. And we only raised a million dollars and we can't afford 20 people in Silicon Valley to like do this sort of thing. And I'm just like – I'm like, oh my god. What did you think was going to happen? And then these people get angry that like the idea gets taken from them from a staff of engineers who can do it all day. And they just see the one little thing they propose that was different from what they do all the time. And so the question is like, so what's the fairer thing? I guess if those – so for example, if all those people in China who could do the engineering were in the United States, we would have a different conversation about it. I think the anger and the angst comes from the fact that those engineers are in China and you have Americans coming up with like these kind of clever ideas and then like somehow these Chinese people are stealing it, right? And doing it. But if it turned into like an employment factory for Americans who were just sitting there being able to engineer these things, I feel like the narrative would be different.

Dave Jones: It wouldn't make the same headlines. People would still be, oh, that's a bit unfair but tough luck. But it makes headlines, bigger headlines.

Asia: But more people would know people immediately who are benefited because they have a job as a result of it. Right. Right. It's like I'm angry about this but like food is on my table because my dad who works at the injection molding company is getting orders, right? Right. And so – and the guy who came up with the idea wasn't smart enough to ask my dad to actually help him design the thing, right? And so the fact that my dad can design it, I don't know. So it's a tough – it's a tough problem to sort of solve. But, you know, so I feel, you know, look, I mean we're not – you want to make sure that people are fairly rewarded for the efforts they put on either side. And me coming from the engineer side, I know I put a lot of hard work to engineer my products.

Dave Jones: But an idea is not effort. An idea is not worthy of being rewarded for. Just an idea. Right. In my opinion, you've got to put in the hard yards.

Asia: No, no. That's exactly what I think is. I can come up with ideas all day long. You just give me some beer and we'll shoot the breeze like in – Exactly. We'll have three good ideas on the table, right? And then the challenge is picking the right one, reducing the practice, doing it in the right way, and getting it to market. And that is like where all the hard work is in doing this sort of stuff. But there's this notion that, you know, the idea is really what's worth it. No. And I think it comes from this sort of like Tony Stark vision of how engineers work. Alone. Alone. Robots. And you drink some beer. You come up with the idea and say, Jarvis, make this for me. And you come back. Fabricated. You do a fabricated prototype at the end of the day. And really it was the idea because Jarvis couldn't come up with the idea himself. Like Jarvis is portrayed as – I mean, okay, maybe after he became the Vision or whatever it is, he got more of a – Yes. Let's add the details of Marvel Universe. Yes, I love it. Jarvis is more of a – he's always computed as sort of a tool, right? Like he almost hilariously characterized as making some small mistakes in the lab. Like I know it was the robot arm that would like spray Tony Stark with a fire extinguisher after his accident happened or something like this. Right. Yeah. It's more of almost like a buffoonish kind of character. And the reality I think couldn't be farther from that truth. I think engineers – number one, hopefully you're an engineer because you love being an engineer and you like doing your work. And as a result, I feel that the idea that I should have to work every day to put food on my table isn't unappealing to me, right? That I should – someone told me like, okay, you come up with an idea and you sell it. And for about a year, maybe two years or something like this, you're going to – it'll make money. But you have to come up with something new in a couple of years, right? You should expect for the next 20 years that you're going to like make money off of this, right? Right. If someone told me that like for a year or two, you're protected and you can monetize your idea and it's enough time for you to make your next product, I'd be like, that's fair.

Dave Jones: I can deal with that, right? You would probably support patents then in some different – yeah, some different way, some different system that gave you a year or two. Yeah. Definitely.

Chris Gammell: It's kind of like what you talked about on Embedded Bunny too, right? Where you said you don't trade on your PhD anymore because you did it 20 years ago, right? It's like that same idea. But some people do expect to trade on their PhD from 20 years ago, right?

Asia: Oh, yeah. So some people like – yeah, almost use it as a crutch. Sorry. Right. But like – then they come out like, I am doctor, blah, blah, blah. You want to just rub in your face that they're – I mean like, okay. That was – never mind. I mean what you did last week, right? I mean I think that's totally legit, honestly. It is. Right. Yeah. But there's – I mean so there's one aspect of sort of the human condition which is like of course you want to do the least amount of work you have to do to gain the maximum profit. And pushing for really long monopoly rights to a good idea is a manifestation of that. Like this – wouldn't it be great if we could all just sit back and just sit pina coladas on the beach and have a factory behind us churning out product because IP protection is perfect and people will just pay for it because they have to buy it. Right? Like that really benefits one narrative, right? But then it really leaves other people who want to also innovate in the field and to move the field forward out in the cold because they can't – they've been locked out of that ecosystem in a way. Right? And yeah, it's funny. So I think that as an engineer like – actually the way open source is sort of progressing and the way sharing in the world works is that even without sort of really strong patent or copyright protection, I'm able to sort of monetize my ideas for a period of time. That's long enough for me to get to the next generation. And it does force me to be competitive. Like I can't just sit there and be like, hey, I made an open source laptop. Now we're going to sell that for the next five years. No one else can make open source laptops. I own that idea. Like I'm like, no. That's ridiculous. Like actually other people should make better, faster, cheaper open source laptops. But, you know, my initial campaign was good enough and we sold enough of them and that – and I structured that business so that now I'm done with it. Like I'm not actually like currently developing on Novena stuff because there's other more interesting things and better things to develop on. Other people can do open source laptops now. And I feel that like that system is working out okay somehow. I don't know. I don't know. I haven't figured out what that sort of balance is. But I think part of the trick is I really genuinely love engineering. Every morning I want to wake up and I want to lay on a circuit board. I want to design some circuits. I want to come up with like something that is valuable that people want to use and people will pay for it and that's new. And it's not that I want to do this, stop doing it, and then just see the dollars rolling all day long. Yeah. Nerd. Nerd. Nerd. In the best way possible.

Asia: This is – don't put me in charge of finances, right? Right. Yeah. This is not going to something – I'm sure that you've had opportunities to go towards that management-type stuff. Sure. Yeah. This is not a pitch you give a VC. Yeah. We're going to work for the rest of our lives, right? Yeah. And we're going to earn our money the hard way. No, no, no. That's right. Right. Right. VCs want to hear like I'm going to get 10x on my money because I just – With a modest return. Yeah. And I'm going to – because I was smart and I saw the future. That's kind of like the VC's idea. And the funny thing is they managed to pull it off. They make tons of money just doing that sort of thing. And if that's what you care about, then you also really care about IP and lock-in and stuff like that because that's part of the game for them.

Dave Jones: What are people, because of your pretty high public profile these days, it seems to be getting bigger, what are people approaching you with these days? What sort of proposals have you been getting? In generalities, of course. Of course, yeah. I'm not going to say. X company came up and offered me to be on their board of directors.

Asia: No, no, no. Nothing like that for sure.

Chris Gammell: Is it laptop-centric or is it – well, you mentioned some biology stuff.

Dave Jones: I'd love to know just anything. What pops up in your email box? What sort of offers?

Asia: I mean, I would say, unfortunately, like – so I had this policy for many years, up until only the last couple of years, where I tried to respond to every email in my inbox. Right, yeah.

Dave Jones: That reaches a point where it's not viable.

Asia: I feel really bad that, like, sometimes I just can't – like, the problem is some of the emails are just so vague and so – Bunny, I have an idea. Almost literally like that. I had this idea. It's going to be revolutionary. You've got to help me build it. Like, it will be that vague. Yep. I get a mulit on you. Yeah. And I'm just like, how do I even respond to, like – You can't engage. You can just respond with, okay.

Chris Gammell: Okay.

Asia: The problem is, you mean you say, okay, then they start pulling into, like, these con calls and these things and they start pitching. It ends up being just, like, this, like, waste of your time, right, at the end of the day.

Chris Gammell: And it's like – Oh, I just meant you respond with, okay, and then you block their email and then you just – that problem solves itself.

Speaker ?: Right.

Chris Gammell: Okay, yeah, sure.

Asia: You block their email. Yeah. But then you risk getting at least this really angry but very aggressive person trying to email you, right? Yeah, right. But the worst is when they get really aggressive and they think they're entitled to response. And anyways. Yeah. Yeah. But I would say, like, if I get very specific directed questions at me, I love those because I can answer them. Yeah. Right? They're like, hey, like, you know, I just had, like, this one very specific problem. Like, is this – should I do this or do that? I have, like, this, like, circuit problem. I go, sure, whatever. That's – those are almost easy to answer. The harder ones are like, hey, like, you know, we're trying to do a startup doing blah and it's some change the world kind of thing, obviously. Oh, I can't solve – and they can't solve this one problem. And when you read it, it's like the problem that would change the world. And I'm like, yes, that's why you're doing that. Right.

Chris Gammell: If you could just help us desalinate all the water on the earth, that would be great, buddy. That would be really great.

Asia: If I could do that, I would also have that sort of doing that thing, right? Right.

Chris Gammell: Right. That would be amazing.

Asia: The logo's not the hard part, folks. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, man, those are – it's sometimes heartbreaking because you can tell these people were genuinely well-intentioned. They just hadn't thought everything through and they didn't raise enough money or whatever it was.

Dave Jones: Have you ever tried to break it to them gently that their idea is not that original and it's probably not going to work? Or do you just –

Asia: Oh, I hate discouraging people.

Chris Gammell: I know, me too. You know, Dave loves discouraging people. Come on, man.

Dave Jones: No, I just love being honest. I mean, you know.

Asia: You do busted videos, Dave.

Dave Jones: I know.

Asia: I feel like I definitely – I very clearly remember being a newbie and I still am a newbie in many things. And I've grown to where I am because people were magnanimous, kind enough to answer my stupid questions, right? And I feel that there's like this cycle of life that has to be sort of maintained to make sure we have like new engineers and new ideas. And I can't pick a winner or loser from one email in two words or something like that. So it's just kind of – these days it's partially an attitude. If it's clearly a person who's more like a marketing or sales guy who I just can't – like they just want to leverage something about me. Come on. I'm not your fault for a person.

Dave Jones: I would not discourage the beginners. You know, like if they're a newbie or whatever and I can tell. But, you know, those ones that come to me with their, I've got this million-dollar year idea, billion-dollar idea. I've been working on it for five years. I'm so convinced this is going to – and like five minutes of Google searching can totally bust it. Why? It's not going to work. It's like, yeah, I'm going to let those people know. You know, it's like –

Asia: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like – But there are occasionally some really interesting, good emails from people that I find are really credible. And I really want to help them. But at the moment, like my plate is super full. Of course, yeah. And so a lot of times I'm just like – I'm just like, ah, man, like maybe in a few months. But I know your time scale is shorter than that. And here's a couple of pointers. And I hope – I don't know. You know, I wish them the best on their way.

Dave Jones: And maybe they'll come back when you're not as busy maybe or when you have a slot or where they're advanced a bit further. You know?

Asia: Yeah. Some of my best leads have been sort of from engagements like that where I'm like, I can't really do it now. But, you know, ask me in a few months and they come back – oops, sorry, they come back and it turns out to be, you know, really fulfilling. But it's, you know, it's – it really – it's weird. Like sometimes it's feast or famine. Like I think – like it was noted about a year ago I was kind of going through a dry spell and really trying to search for what the thing was. And now I'm just like overwhelmed with stuff and – Right. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Too much seeking, huh? Yeah. So we had a question from one of our – one of our listeners on the subject here. And it's kind of tied to what you're talking about with like the pay it forward thing too. But he or she was asking about young and budding open source enthusiast, hardware hacker, blah, blah, blah. Do you – do you have people helping you with your project? So this person is asking if – if you need help, you know, like I always wonder about that too because it's – bringing people on can be kind of a overhead, right? The question is – Oh, here it is.

Asia: M-C-U. Yeah. M-C-U-U. Oh, yeah. Tricky. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. But I think the main idea being that like, you know, are you bringing people on to help with – like you said, you kind of set aside Novena, right? Or you're not developing on it, right? Yeah. Is that the kind of thing where you would go and mentor people that do want to go take that further or whatever?

Asia: Well, I mean, totally. So there's a community around Novena and we work hard to service them. Like in other words, we create a piece and then we hand the baton over and then we want to make sure they keep running. So we're going to build some other boards and Sean, you know, checks the forums and people ask us questions and need support. And we support specific – like some projects specifically that help maintain that community. So we're not abandoning the project. No, no, no. We're not developing a Novena 2, right? A lot of people are like, are you building like a faster open source laptop? No. Like that's not – I'm not going to just create generation after generation the same thing just because one of them was a hit, right? That's actually one of the hardest things to avoid is that when you get your first taste of success is to keep on doing that thing. So like when I first did the Xbox, there was like this whole thing of like of course there's a next generation Xbox and generation after that. And so there's people who build whole careers off of hacking phones or being like jailbreakers or being Xbox guys or whatever it is or whatever. They build fame and reputation around hyper-specializing into one field. And I deliberately did not buy an Xbox 360 at all because I didn't want to become like the Xbox hacker. I didn't want to be pigeonholed into that one thing. It's so limiting. You can't explore. You can't create. You can't – all of a sudden your time is set by the release schedule of a video game console at Christmas and beating everyone else to getting the solution for it. And it's so constraining in terms of personal growth, right? And so part of that is – sorry, I got off topic from answering the question. So the thing is I need tons of help to do everything that I do. And I think I get – I hope I give lots of credit to these people. Like I mean Sean Zobz Cross does like basically all the firmware for a lot of the things I build. Like if you build hardware without firmware, it's just a shiny object that has no use, right? And Sean does a really – he's an amazing coder, amazing firmware. He's very flexible. He goes like the full stack all the way from, you know, like bare iron bootloaders to cloud stuff, right? And I try to keep up with him. Like I really don't – like after he sort of develops a framework, I end up sort of using it myself and trying to play it forward. And then like – so now I can like port like ChibiOS to almost any platform because he's taught me how to do that. And that's like another thing that I've learned and I'm glad I know how to do that. And so definitely like on the firmware side, I get tons of help. And in Chibitronics, like I work with G.C. She's an artist and a designer. And there's no way I could have come up with paper electronics or like these beautiful paradigms or even just like how to approach education and think about it without her constant influence on my life and trying to push me to become better in that area, right? And so – and then there's my whole staff in China who help, you know, build this stuff and make it happen. And those guys are absolutely magic. And they are so humble and they're so kind and they – you know, the thing that's always really heartwarming working with them is like I'll start a new project with them and I'll throw them like my schematics and my Gerber and my bomb and like the test plans and all that sort of stuff. And I say like, okay, quote it out, you know. And then they make this beautifully formatted quote for me and I just like write a purchase order out. Three weeks later, everything shows up built, right? Right. And then I go back to them and I'm just like, you know, guys, like this is like – thank you so much for doing this. It's like really – it helps me a lot that you guys do this. And the only response is ingaida, which is Chinese for like it's my job. Of course I do it this way, right? Right. Like they're just so – they're just so humble about it and they do amazing things. So, yeah, I have a lot of help doing a lot of work. That being said, I rarely co-design a circuit board with anyone. Right. Like I will – if I'm going to – That's tough. You can't do that. Yeah. Yeah. It's so hard to do that, right? And so usually what happens – Daughter board. No, no. Like ecosystem supports and like other things I can do with other people. But like circuit board design is one of those things where it's like this – it's almost like I kind of have to meditate on the subject for like two weeks.

Dave Jones: Yeah, yeah.

Asia: Not doing it. But like things are like coming together in my head. And then there's this one moment like this orgy of schematic design where like it all comes down. And then I sleep on it for a day or two. And I'll go back and fix all the bugs because like I'll miss a couple things. And then the layout happens. It's another sort of just like big session of doing it. And so those do tend to be very like singular exercises. And if people notice that like who work with me notice that I don't answer emails, I'm not eating, I'm not – I'm not like I'm just kind of –

Dave Jones: He's laying out of the board, folks, if he doesn't reply to your email. That's right.

Asia: I'm probably in one of those phases where I'm just like so plugged in and like I'm writing my very long code or I'm doing this sort of thing. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Well, Altium tried that and failed because when I worked at Altium, one of the big pushes at the time was, oh, everything's going co-designed. You know, and everyone's trying to copy this now. Oh, you can have five people working on the PCB layout all at once, all of these, you know, co-designed. You know, it's actually quite difficult from a software point of view to enable this. But they kind of did it. And it kind of sort of worked. But it missed the point of that's not how these things work in practice, you know. And basically, I don't think anyone actually uses that feature. It's built in.

Asia: Oh, that's too bad. I saw that feature. I was like, that looks so interesting. I would really like to try a co-design someday. But I think part of the thing is like one of the reasons – and so let me put it this way. Like if one person can do the whole task by themselves, they will get it done faster than if two people have to do it, right? The moment you have to like split a task between two people, the interface overhead like just piles up. So you have to – I think the point at which you start amortizing, splitting a project is around five. Like once you can get five good – like all engineers as good as the one all working together, you'll come up with something that's actually better and bigger than that thing. And so like for example, you have big design teams who design smartphones and laptops and these complex things. And they have like teams of five, six, seven people doing like iPhone motherboards and stuff like that. And you'll get really sublime things that no one individual can do. Like I can't design an iPhone motherboard on my own. Too many details, too much stuff. It wouldn't fit in my head in that situation. Right. But they can get together a team of people to do that. But, you know, in terms of an open source world, getting five really talented engineers together and getting to just focus solely on this without pay is just not going to happen, right? It's – and the big rub is we do this without pay, right? Or a lot of it's paying it forward, right? Like you invest in the design first and then you hope once you build it, it pays back. Or this – whatever arcane mechanisms you have for making it worth your time. And so there is – I think there's a limit to how complex an open source project in hardware at least can get because of that overhead. And also there's a limit because it's just – as opposed to like Linux and software. Like Linux is like you can just check in code. The whole project goes into Git and someone else can get that commit like within seconds. And hardware, if I make a change to something in the hardware, I have to FedEx it to you. Right. Right. And that's expensive and hard and slow. And you also have to have a whole harder workbench next to you. It's not like I just need a laptop. I have to get like an oscilloscope and I have to get a soldering iron. And you have to have the same soldering skill that I have. And we all have to be on the same page in so many like things to really be effective in that area. And so it's – there's definitely a slower cadence. Like – so I work with, like I say, Gigi who's – she's at MIT in Boston, Cambridge right now. And we're co-designing this clip for the LTC board. And the cycle on it, it's really long. It's like several weeks for iteration because we have to prototype in China. I have to review it. Then I FedEx it onto her. And just the FedEx time alone, you know, is two weeks for it to hit Singapore and then hit Boston. And then her to feedback and then do this sort of thing. And this is a very simple – relatively simple task that we're working. That gives me an idea of like just the cadence at which product development can go when you have a distributed team of people who are working on a shoestring budget. Right.

Chris Gammell: Right, yeah. Because you could also – if you had a huge budget, you could also pay for the overnight shipping. But you don't have that. Yeah.

Asia: If I had a huge budget, I'd pay for it to be out here. I'd get a plane ticket and sit next to me for the next two months and we're going to like hammer everything out right now. Like that would be an idea where if I had infinite money, we could just get the whole team together. And essentially what you have is like what Apple has, right, in their headquarters, right? Right, yeah. But we don't. We do this on a shoestring budget. And so there's a limit as to how big of a project you can do without some financing behind it.

Dave Jones: So projects that your – new project ideas that you come up with, what would cause you to like abandon one or choose one? Can you think, oh, yeah, we can sell X of these down the track. I think there's probably a market for this. Or do you just do it – like I can't imagine you're putting six months' worth of work into a project just for fun, right? I mean, granted, you have. I have. Right? Yeah, you have. But like serious hours. Serious hours with no hint that it might be successful.

Asia: Yeah. I mean, so I think the – okay. There are two answers I want to give to this. One is success and one is failure. So let's not forget this, too. I'll start with the failure first. So there was one project that I had – and this is probably around the time when I was like a little depressed and things weren't working out. I had this project I just canned around that time. I wanted to solve the sort of secure messaging problem in a way that was foolproof for everyday people and also actually really airtight from a hardware standpoint. Like just separated execution domains. So you're talking about phone messaging?

Chris Gammell: Like the Signal app that's come out, that kind of thing?

Asia: No, no. It wasn't a software. I actually want – I'm a hardware guy, right? Yeah, of course. So I think in terms of hardware. So it started from – Sacrifice Chris. Yeah. It started from like a keyboard that you would plug in to your laptop. And the keyboard would encrypt the keys. You have a secure encryption domain. Yeah, yeah. Right. And you had a little display on it and you would type and then like it would send PGP encrypted ASCII armor text into your email buffer, right?

Dave Jones: So the plain text never even hit your computer, right? You'll find it on AliExpress next month, folks. Sure, right?

Asia: That's fine. There's a reason why I didn't do it. And then, you know, for the back path, we would use like audio to actually play back to the keyboard and render it, which is actually part of the reason why I have audio programming in LTC is that we had developed some of this technology as part of this. This security project, right? Or we also consider like video cameras. Like other back channels we could use. The criteria was you want to have like a thing you could carry into the heart of, I don't know, like some terrible war in tour country and you want to report there. And you want to plug into an internet cafe. You trust nothing. Yeah. But you want to send secure messages and you could do that, right? So this keyboard kind of started from that genesis, right? But I wanted to make it like super easy. Like a reporter could use it with no technical background. Like my mom could use it. Like anyone could use it, right? And then I started like talking. Like I had done industrial design work. I had done the schematics. I'd spent months like sort of like getting this product together. And then I started talking about use cases and started reviewing the use case with people. And I found like the big problem is that everything had gone mobile, right? And in the mobile phone form factor, no one's going to bust out their keyboard to like check a message. You know, someone, the whole idea of encrypt. One of the things about encryption is you shouldn't just use encryption for like the important messages. You want to use encryption on all your messages. But it becomes a side channel. Someone says like, you know, urgent message and that one is encrypted. They know something's going to happen. They know it's important. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Whereas every day, every single like little like, hey, I'm going to like, yeah, yeah. I'm going to meet you for dinner or something. That should be encrypted too because that just blends everything. It makes it harder to sort of like do a sort of a profiling of what's going on in your life, right? Totally. And so I wanted to be so casual. People say, yeah, you want to meet for dinner tonight and that should be encrypted and using the same system. And people would do that all over mobile. And the problem is I couldn't solve the mobile problem. I had no solution that was foolproof and easy to use in a mobile problem. And the problem is if you don't solve that problem effectively for the users, they're going to just put private keys onto the mobile phone. And then in my opinion, game over, right? Mobile platforms are untrusted. They're dirty, dirty, dirty places. And you shouldn't trust anything that you put on it. But the problem is it's so convenient that people put their private keys on it to do GPT on their phones. And they're carrying their private keys around with them then. That's the problem? Yeah. It's not hardware encrypted. And there's some crypto nerds who can figure out who are willing to go through having these separate things to isolate their keys and stuff. But it's not to the point where I could just give it to my mom and my mom would use it. That's where I wanted to get it to. The criteria for the product was my mom could use this thing and send me messages and send me pictures of her flowers using it. Couldn't get there. Couldn't figure out that problem. I can that, right? There was like months of effort that I just threw away because I couldn't solve.

Dave Jones: So that wasn't part-time effort. That was like I'm working on this. This is going to be my next big thing kind of full time.

Asia: Yeah. I really was passionate about it. I wanted it to be my next big thing. I actually took a big chunk of sort of some of the money that we had managed to retain from Novena and invested in this. And it was a loss at the end of the day. I couldn't. There's no return. Right? No one's heard about the project because it was just such a bad idea. It turns out. It's kind of sad. So not everything I do makes it to market. And one of the things is like, you know, I try not to drink my own Kool-Aid. I was so excited about the project. Right, yes. I couldn't see the forest for the trees. And when I actually started talking to people, I was crushed when, you know, I ran up past my girlfriend. She's like, I would never use this. I was like, oh, come on. Really? Like, you see me working on this thing. And she's like, yeah, you made it thin and light and all sorts of stuff. But, ah. I'm still not going to plug it in.

Dave Jones: What an effort.

Asia: It's too much effort. Right? Yeah. I mean, like, you know, it was like.

Chris Gammell: I was like, you did that before you got the, you know, like the first run and you were trying to sell it. Right?

Asia: Yeah. No, but I had gotten to the point to, like, picking out, like, the plastics and the fiber. Like, I was like, it was really far along. Like, it was.

Chris Gammell: Anyways. But that's how it goes, right? I mean, that's. I mean, I think that's a great lesson. It's frustrating. It sounds frustrating as hell. But, like, that's. The people that are listening right now should know that even people like Bunny go through this crap. Right? Like, that's important. Yeah.

Asia: But you have to. But the most important thing I want to get across is that I was able to walk away from it. It was a bad idea. Yeah. Even though I invested a lot in it, I killed it. Right? It was hard to kill it, but I killed my baby. And that's.

Chris Gammell: How would you do it different next time? I mean, like, if you. I mean, obviously you have, you know, 20-20 vision now, of course. Right? Blah, blah, blah. But, like, did you miss a step that you should have done?

Asia: I think it's. I should have been a little more fail forward fast. I should have prototyped a little more. So, like, in LTC, for example, like, earlier on, I said, I went through five generations of microcontrollers on LTC before you got to the one four or five or whatever it is. And, like, the first couple ones were at Tiny base, like, horrible bombs. And we did user testing immediately. Like, the first thing we did is we got them into people's hands. Of people who weren't our developers and engineers. We got them in the hands of people who were, like, you know, clueless children trying to, like, use this stuff. We're like, this is unusable. How does anyone, like, get a kid to use a JTAG box to program, you know, at Tiny or something like this? Right? This is just. Hey, kids.

Dave Jones: We got a surprise for you today.

Asia: Right? This made your dad cry, too. That's where we start. That's where it started. And we ended up with audio-based programming through this cloud-based infrastructure. Like, you know, it was, like, this huge arc. That we had to go through multiple generations of throwing away ideas until we finally get. And we're still not perfect. But I think we're, like, at least they hadn't invested a ton of, like, time into a really bad approach. You didn't perfect that one bomb that was really expensive, right? Because you wanted to really optimize that. Right, right, right. And even though I say we've only been working LTC, like, really, really hardcore for the last few months, we started playing with microcontroller technology ideas three years ago. Uh-huh. Yeah. Just toying around thinking in people's hands and sort of letting it simmer and letting, like, the user experiences come out and listening to the users and developing and refining. And the entire time, of course, the world's moving around us. And so we have to make sure that we're not doing something someone's already done. Yeah. And it's frustrating when you think you have a path and you see someone came up with something that was better than what you had because, you know, they just executed on it, right? And so it's hard. But it requires this process of sort of iterating and listening and making sure everything happens. The other story I want to tell is there's – I mean, I guess one of the nice things about living in Singapore is the cost of living here is, like, incredibly low. It has a bad rap for being an expensive city. But if you look at sort of like what the average –

Speaker ?: That's what I thought, yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah, like people there can't afford a car, you know, like owning a car there is ridiculously expensive. I guess you don't need to, though, for the public transport. But you don't need a car. Yeah, exactly.

Asia: You've actually hit the crux of the problem is that when they do the comparisons, they use a standard basket of goods, which includes, like, a five-bedroom house, a car, and literally down to, like, buying tomato sauce and pasta, which are not popular things here, and they're import goods.

Dave Jones: And so everything's imported there, isn't it, though? Even your water, everything.

Asia: Well, there's some things that are more local than others, right? Right. And the thing at the end of the day is, like, while it's a good idea to have a price index that does a one-for-one comparison, that's very rigorous in terms of what you're doing, it doesn't account for, like, local – like, not everyone lives like a Westerner, right? Right. You can live like a Singaporean. Right. And the thing that kind of cued me into it is, like, I started, like, back when we first moved here and we had Chumbie, you know, the field office, I started looking at hiring some of the local people, and I saw the starting salary. I was like, how do people live with a starting salary like this, right? Like, I knew what I was getting. I knew what they were going to be paid. And there's this huge, huge, huge gap. And so I started looking into it. And this, like, if you – like, Singapore, 80% of the people are starting to live in public housing, and it's great. And so I stopped living in private housing. I moved in public housing, and all of a sudden my expenses went down dramatically. Yeah. They have public health care. They have public transportation. They have, like, all these – anyway, so the point is at the end of the day is, like, my cost of living went from what I was used to having in the United States slashed by 5X, 6X, something like this. Wow. Wow. Yep. And so that allows me to have more time to think and to experiment when I'm sort of coasting between projects, right? I'm not as worried about the next – I don't have to immediately kill another bull to, like, feed the family, right? I can just be like, okay, we're just going to – we're going to do this for a little while. And so there's one kind of in-between time where I was like, okay, we've been using the STM32 for a long time. It's kind of getting old in the teeth. We've already done the IMX6. We need a new platform. We need a new sub-$1 microcontroller platform. Like, I need to have my new go-to thing, right? And so I looked around at all the different stuff. I said, okay, Kinetis seems pretty good. Like, they have, like, sub-$1 stuff that goes all the way up to, like, high-end things. But it requires, like, learning about, like, how to build for all the quirks. You know, you're going to fail in the first couple projects before you really understand a new microcontroller ecosystem. Cool. And so we started a project which was actually just targeted for Burning Man. I was going to build, like, a little lighting project for Burning Man. It turned into this, like, the Orchard badge, which you can read about on the internet. It lets you have sex between people and all this sort of – like, lighting sex. Not real sex. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Lighting sex. There's the other stuff happening there too, Bunny. Come on.

Chris Gammell: Let's be honest.

Asia: It was all breeding light patterns. Right.

Chris Gammell: Like a genetic algorithm type stuff.

Asia: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so that one really didn't have any specific financial reward. It was totally a design study, right? Just, you know, like how sometimes some artists, they will do these movements in still life or whatever it is. Like, just, like, they'll just draw pictures of fruit or something like this and not intend it for the gallery. Right. That's basically – because we knew the first one we're going to have, we're going to get it wrong. Right. So we just built this thing. But there was no return from it at the end of the day. Like, we built it for the Burning Man crew. And we had – I built, like, 80 of them for the people. I sold it at cost and that was it. But what the real value was was the IP at the end of the day. Like, learning that – Right. You knew the flow and all that stuff, right? And when I say IP, I don't mean copyrights or pens. I mean I now understood. I now had, like, intuitive fluency. Mental IP.

Dave Jones: Mental IP.

Asia: Mental IP. True intellectual property. Like, you owned it. It's in your brain. Like, in my brain, like, I can now port to, like, any, like, target member of that line within, like, less than a day. Like, I can port this core operating system we did to it. I can, like, light – I can bang out a board. I can do this stuff. And so, like, now you're seeing Kinetis in all my products. Like, the KLO2 is inside the Chibitron XLTC. And we use it in other – as, like, sort of, like, little – like, sort of, like, the little jelly bean microcontrollers that you need all around your circuit board to make things happen. We used those. It was used in the introspection engine with the Snowden project and all that sort of stuff. And so, like – and so, even though, like, that one didn't have a direct payoff, like, I've been milking it for the last, like, three or four years. And, in fact, it's been some, like, just some, you know, for-pay, for-hire project where people are like, oh, we need this thing. It's really hard and blah, blah, blah. And I was like, actually, that sounds like I can just build you, like, an embedded controller for it. We'll just make it all go away. And they're like, whoa. Like, you just – you turned this thing out, like, overnight. You're a genius. You're so smart. I'm like, no, no, you don't understand. I spent six months learning how to do this.

Chris Gammell: No, Bunny, you don't understand.

Asia: You got to just be like, oh, yeah, I am. Here's my bill. Because you build up all this, quote, unquote, you know, IP. But the IP is really, like, it's what's in my head and what I'm really fluent and able to use. And you have to constantly – it's like an athlete. You just have to keep on going to the gym. It's investing in your future, right? I mean – Yeah, and building that fluency in a modern technology. And the thing that we wanted to avoid was, like, you know, with STM32. STM32 did come up with some newer product eventually. So they're kind of competitive with Kinesis. But, like, the problem at the time was that they – like, it was so easy to keep going back to them. They had so many quirks and problems. And you just – I was constantly fitting square pegs in round holes. And it's so easy to sit in my laurels and just not try something new. Right. Because going to Kinesis, I was a noob. Like, I didn't – I could – like, now I look at the reference manual. I know exactly where to go to find this particular question for this problem. And when you get into a new microcontroller system, like, where in the heck in this 1,000-page manual do I find where the pull-ups are set on the GPIO? Because, like, some people put it in the GPIO section. Some people put it in the pin control mux. Some people put it in, like, the IOS. Like, you know, where is it, right? It seems like a simple question. And searching doesn't really help, folks. It doesn't help. And it's like – and then you learn a quirks, like – like, so one thing about the Canada's line, they were very modular in the engineering, which meant that their manuals are very modular. And so their section that talks about pull-ups and pull-downs will talk about all the features that you can have in every single combination of that line, which is not all the features you have in the one that you've picked. And so you also have to know this other trick that you have to go to this first section that says, here's what we actually put in your chip versus what we documented in this manual. Oh, yeah. That's really tricky, right? And that's something you don't – they don't really – like, no one really tells you about this up front. And you'll only learn this by freaking making that mistake. That's right. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Making coasters. Making coasters for your coffee table.

Asia: Making coasters and having lots of blue wires and stuff like that. And now, like, I can knock out a board and be like, okay, I'll probably have good success with it. No problem. But, like, those first few boards were, like, really frustrating. And that's like being a noob again. Like, I was – You should. Right? Beginner's mind. Yeah. I had to learn a new thing. And so that's another – when you say picking a project, sometimes I just pick a project because I know it's time for me to, like, sharpen up. Like, I'm getting old. I'm getting tired. I just need to – I need to sharpen up on this technology. So I'll just do something just for the purpose of sharpening up. Yeah. Awesome. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: We got a couple other – there's one question in here that I've been staring at on the list of questions that I am curious about because I remember you doing this too. Kasbah asked about the video you did with Ian a long time ago. And you were showing schematic books. So you talk about sharpening up as well. But, you know, just ideas and kind of – you showed off those schematic books as well. What – but he was having trouble finding them. I've never seen them myself. Are those actually a thing that you have to go to Shenzhen for?

Asia: Yeah. They're hard to find. They are hard to find. Oh, they are. Okay. I would agree. Like, books and schematics – I mean, it's not going to be on Amazon, right?

Speaker ?: No.

Asia: No, obviously not. They're unique to the Chinese ecosystem. I mean, they're phrased in the form of repair manuals, right? Mm-hmm. And actually, the bookstore that used to sell all of those things got remodeled. I don't know where it moved. Oh, no. And so one day, I went back to go visit it, and it was just – they turned it into some shopping mall. And I was like, ah. And I haven't found it since. I haven't been able to find, like, an updated book of laptop schematics. But the phone schematics, they keep churning out, and those are sold in the mobile phone market, the one that – the big one that everyone goes to. The trick is that they don't – I think the vendors know – I don't know. It's kind of gray market kind of thing. And so if you ask the wrong way, they'll be like, we've never seen these things. All right. Right. They don't exist here. Where do you keep your legal books? Yeah. And so what I've developed is they always have a certain format. They always print it in a certain form factor, and they always hide them under a pile of other things. And so oftentimes, let's go to the stall and look around. If I see that pile, I'll look in there and see if those happen to be a new set of schematics that are interesting to get. A lot of these – a lot of the phone schematics, actually, they're so hot that, like, you can even get them online. The problem is the people who distribute them online often – I don't know. The websites are super sketchy. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I don't even want to – yeah. I don't even want to touch them. And then also, I like getting printed copies of this stuff because there's a personal reason for it. I won't say because it might be used against me in the court of law.

Chris Gammell: But anyways – He's talking about marking up schematics, folks. He also writes on them.

Asia: I'm just kidding. Yeah. Yeah. Printed copies have nice properties on being countable. Right. And so – yeah. And so – and so they're really great – I'm a hardware person. I like feeling things and looking at them. Yeah. So there's – it's nice to be able to just flip through them and just, like, browse very quickly as opposed to, like, dealing with a PDF and zooming in in that one little spot and then zooming out and then, like, scrolling through the pages and whatever it is. So the phone schematics you can probably find – a lot of them are online. The laptops schematics, I do admit, have become harder to find. I should probably – I should probably take on a project just to figure out where that bookstore went because I don't think they stopped making those things. I think they – Yeah. I just – I just – Shuffled. I lost – yeah, I lost that thread. Yeah. Yeah. Hmm. Cool.

Dave Jones: There's another question here from Logical Elegance. Can this be our last one, Chris?

Chris Gammell: I think we've actually already – this is what we started with, Dave. Oh, I did you? Okay. I don't know if you were here, but go ahead. All right. Because I think we kind of circled around this as well. You're talking about the 45 thing?

Dave Jones: Yes. The 40 – you know, you were – That's Alicia. If people don't know, that's Alicia. Alicia actually asked that. Yeah, Alicia. She got the impression when you were on Embedded FM that you thought your career might be over when you hit 45 and how can people stay engaged in tech? I guess my question would be – I mean, you're an enthusiastic hardware nerd, so I think that's not going to be a problem. But do you see your – I'll still be doing this in my rocking chair, you know. Like, but do you see possibly you moving into something else? Perhaps like I moved from the hardware business and now I'm a video blogger, entertainer, YouTube content producer, you know. Like, do you see or feel that there might be some sort of other direction you might go in?

Asia: Yeah, I mean, I like to say that – how do I say this without making it sound stupid? I'll just say it. I like to say my life is a series of PhDs, but I don't actually go to school to get them. Like, I got my first PhD, right? And they taught me a template when I got it of how to learn and figure something out. And then the next thing is I did another sort of same-style kind of program around another topic that took about four to five years. And that was like in chip design. And then I did another same-style topic that took four to five years and that was around optics. And then another four or five years around manufacturing and electronics. And actually what people see a lot of times and they characterize like my achievements as the most recent few things they've read about, right? But I think part of – as we were talking about earlier, like having the mind of a new person and see things fresh and all that sort of stuff. I like to challenge myself to do different things that I haven't done before. So like we also mentioned earlier in the session, I like biology a lot. And the main barrier for me picking that up is that I am such a noob there that I can't even pay the bills in any serious sense doing any real biology work, right? It's so – it's like – there's sort of like a logistical problem.

Chris Gammell: We'll see people on the streets be like, man, you need something titrated, man. You need something titrated? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Asia: I'll sequence that genome and we'll analyze it for you. Yeah, that's right. That's right.

Dave Jones: You'll have one of those cardboard signs around your neck. Yeah. We'll sequence for money. We'll do X for food, you know.

Asia: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We'll customize your bacteria for cash. Yeah, yeah. So – but I mean like I think – I mean I've been gradually – I've been trying to instead of – in the case of biology, that one's such a drastic shift from what I've done in the past. I've had to almost go back to being like a high school student, you know what I mean? And so it's not going to be like doing a PhD because I don't know enough to do a PhD in biology, right? So I'm now going through the process of just like really like rudimentary learning, a lot of like kind of rote stuff that you have to do to sort of really even get a feel for it to understand the parameters. And so that's a longer term project. I think for me to really become skilled enough to say that I do it, right? And in the meantime, I'm continuing to try different riffs and stuff in the electronics area. As we touched on before, when I was giving that – the comment that like I was kind of stuck in projects. And so that was actually just after I built that keyboard project and I was a little bit dejected. And I didn't know what was in the future and it was hard for me to figure out what to do. And then like I said at the beginning, like fortunately, like people like Edward Snowden found me and kind of gave me an idea and a purpose and really motivated me to do something interesting and exciting, right? And the EFF found me and motivated me to do something really meaningful and exciting, right? Those are – and working with GE and helping kids has also been like meaningful and exciting. So like you can see this sort of trend of where like I was running out of things that I wanted to do as an engineer, but now I'm doing a lot of activism, social, cause-oriented things, right? Because I'm finding meaning now not necessarily from the actual engineering itself, but from what I can do and what it does for other people and what it will mean for the next generation of people, right? And this arc will probably continue for a while and then maybe I'll find something in the engineering side like, oh, I didn't know about that. Maybe I should learn about this crazy thing. I'll do another design exercise and I'll really get into something else. I don't know. It's hard to say what the future will be. There's definitely a risk in a technical field like this that you become obsolete. You know, like knowledge gets stale so fast. Yes, it does. Yeah. Like I'm learning Rust right now, which is like this. Oh, yeah? Nice. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm writing actually an embedded control system in Rust. And I feel like it's one of those things that like you just have to like keep up to date with the stuff. It's so hard because you're like, this would be so easy if I did this in C because I know exactly how to do this. I know the library should do this. But no, I'm really going to deal with all of this like weird returns that they get from Rust and unwrapping functions. And like what am I doing? The reason is because of the web and you're trying to shoehorn it. But yeah, it's great. I mean, actually, I really enjoyed the language. I think it's really smart. I think it's pretty tastefully done. And it sort of takes the best of the really high level languages and the best of the really low level languages and tries to blend them together. The only problem is that you end up being extremely rigorously typed on everything. And so you end up specifying a lot of things that normally you wouldn't have to specify in other languages. And so for me, half of Rust is building it and looking at the list of things like, did you mean to like specify to use this library? Did you mean to do this? Like this whole like phase I have to go through cleaning up my code. I think that's inexperienced, but I also suspect that like for a while I'll be inexperienced in that way. But they do that for a really good reason. And it really aids in the portability and the sustainability. Like I can see why they did this. Like having had to sustain systems and deal with multiple versions and having to do with concurrency and multi-threading and all sorts of stuff. Like this rigor they put into it is quite good. And so, yeah, like I was saying, I'm trying to keep myself up to date. It's hard because it's frustrating. So on the one hand, I want to get this job done and earn the money so I can move on to the next thing. On the other hand, if I just keep on turning the same crank all over again, I'm just going to end up irrelevant, right? As a crank turner, yeah. As a crank turner, right? Right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Well, that's good, man. No, that's kind of lifelong learning stuff. I mean, that's totally the goal, right? I mean, like that's – And if you could figure – I think the point you brought up about the, you know, lowering your cost of living and just kind of like lowering overhead on that kind of stuff, it really does free up to do a lot of things like that. And that's – Yeah. That is the dream, I think. At least I associate with it.

Asia: Yeah. And being able to work with really talented people to sort of push me, inspire me has been helpful to me. Like, yeah, working with Sean. I'm like, I'm not learning Rust because I know Sean has been doing a lot in Rust. And so I see him doing a lot in Rust. I'm like, that looks pretty cool. I should probably do something in it too. Yeah. And so he pushes me and inspires me to sort of be a better person. And, you know, working with G as an artist, he inspires me and pushes me. So it's like, you know, finding some core people to help support you through these tough times I think is also important as well. So it looks like I work alone, but I don't. I mean – And I think – I don't know. It's one of the weird problems I have with sort of publicity. And like you mentioned, I'm getting a higher profile. I'm uncomfortable with that a bit because –

Chris Gammell: Like the personality kind of thing? Yeah.

Asia: It starts to make me look like I'm doing more than I'm really doing and not giving enough credit to the people around me that have helped me get there. Right. So I don't know. We'll see how that evolves.

Chris Gammell: You should tattoo their names on your arm or something. And then you just punch it. It's radical. It's radical. Yeah. That's cool. Well, Bunny, thank you. I mean this has been another – I think this is going to be another favorite of people's. Where can people find your stuff? I mean where should people first go to find your stuff?

Asia: I still have my blog, bunnystudios.com, which unfortunately because I use Twitter a little more, I actually probably – the more relevant stuff is on my Twitter handle, bunnystudios, at bunnystudios. The blog tends to be only more for like major announcements, really deep dives. Yeah, and long form. Yeah, I was saying that. And name that – long form stuff, yeah. Whereas Twitter is more of like, hey, gee, check this out. This is interesting or whatever it is. Yeah. And I've been trying to struggle between balancing the two channels for what's the best way to sort of stay engaged but not get too shallow. And not get sucked in with Twitter too, right? Yeah, yeah. It is. And then I also have two other kind of sites which – so kosagi.com is my secret sort of like – it's my documentation archive basically. And sometimes you'll occasionally see a project appear there that I haven't talked about. That's because I'm about to announce it. But I'll stick it there. My GitHub repo actually is another place to look for stuff that's in the pipe. If you see it appear in the GitHub repo, it means I'm preparing – because I want to make sure the links are live and work before I talk about them, right? So I'll put it all live on GitHub before it goes up. And the other place is, of course, gbtronics.com which is – that one looks more like a corporate website because it is now actually a real company that's functioning and moving forward. But there's a whole bunch of stuff we're doing with Love2Code that's really exciting. And we're redesigning the website. We'll hopefully have that out like in about a month concurrent with the LTC beta. And if you're interested in that, I will become better in communicating about that product soon. I've been really bad actually about talking about it on my own blog and other things because I just haven't figured out how to – normally I do this like – normally I just talk about it on my blog, right? Or Twitter or something like this. But because it's with Chibitronics, now I'm trying to figure out like how do I wedge talking about open source stuff into this very education, kid-friendly website, right? You know, it's like – Right, right, right, right, right. I haven't found the right cadence to sort of like engage people on this yet. But once I figure out like the way to structure the data so I don't – it doesn't get lost in people, I hope to have a lot more interesting stories there about that arc and that development.

Chris Gammell: Awesome. Bunny's seventh PhD is in marketing. Oh, Jesus.

Dave Jones: Shoot me now. We'll shoot you ourselves, yeah.

Asia: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll build a suicide machine before then. Finish myself the fatal dose. My six and a half PhD will be the suicide machine, right?

Dave Jones: There's a Kickstarter no one's done yet.

Asia: Oh, God. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. If I start using marketing terms more than this amount in my emails, I'll automatically administer the drug, right? That's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, man. Oh, Jesus. Love it. Awesome. Thanks again for coming on, Bunny. Thanks, Bunny. It's been awesome. No worries. Good talking to you guys.

Dave Jones: No worries. That was a decent Australian no worries, mate.

Asia: Yeah. All right. See you guys around. See you. See you. Yeah. Yeah, bye.

Asia: Bye.

Speaker ?: Outro Music