#84 – An Interview with Bunnie Huang - Bunnie's Bibelot Bonification

Chris Gammell: This is the Amp Hour Podcast, recorded February 27th, 2012. Episode 84, with guest Bunny Hwan. Bunny's Be Below Bonification.

Dave Jones: Welcome to the Amp Hour. I'm Dave Jones from the EEV blog.

Chris Gammell: And I'm Chris Gammell of Chris Gammell's Analog Life.

Bunny: And I'm Bunny and I'm self-sponsored.

Dave Jones: All right. Excellent. Welcome aboard, Bunny. Thanks for joining us.

Bunny: Yeah, it's good to be here. Thanks.

Dave Jones: And I'm sure everyone knows who you are, Bunny Hwang.

Bunny: I guess.

Dave Jones: That's all you have to say. Well, you pretty much only have to say Bunny and everyone knows who you're talking about in this business anyway. So, you're pretty famous.

Bunny: I guess so. Infamous? Yeah. You know, Bunny's my handle. So, I just go, but hey, it's a bunny, right? Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I actually had an interesting experience with that. I was having drinks with a friend who has a startup. And I mentioned to him, I'm like, oh, you know, like telling him about the podcast, how that's going. And I'm like, yeah, we have this guy on this week who hacked the Xbox. And he's like, oh, yeah, Bunny. And I'm like, whoa, I didn't, you know, this is a friend who's, you know, he's a management kind of guy. And I'm like, oh, you know Bunny. You must have, like, you know, read his book or, you know, you must have known about the electronics work he does. And he's like, no, no. My mom taught him violin back in Michigan.

Bunny: And I'm just like, what? Yeah. Crazy small world.

Chris Gammell: Oh, man. That freaked me out. Yeah.

Bunny: That's ridiculous. Yeah, I was like, I was like, that was like a blast from my past when you told me about it. I was like, whoa, I totally remember them. That's awesome. It was great.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. It was really cool. And he said he remembered, you know, like, he got to see some of the stuff you were working on back then even. And he was in awe of your work.

Bunny: Yeah, there was a little bit of, yeah. It was, you know, back in, this was back in high school. There was sort of this decision point I had to make where my, you know, she had a very good violin teacher. And she sort of was very serious about the art and told me at one point, like, you have to make a choice. Either you're going to go into engineering or you're going into music because you're not spending enough time in music and so on and so forth. And so there was this kind of moment where I had to sort of think, you know, do I really want to be a violinist or do I want to, you know, go into engineering? Yeah. And I decided to go into engineering, so.

Chris Gammell: And we're all happy about that. Well, here I am. Yeah. Good choice. Correct choice. Any music still in your life these days? I mean.

Bunny: Oh, yeah, totally. I mean, music is a huge part of my life. I mean, I think, I mean, violin itself was instrumental in some ways to personal development. There's a lot of emotional development. Chamber music was great in learning how to work with people. A lot of discipline from the practice. And then just I have a huge amount of enjoyment from listening to music and the experience I get from it. So, you know, it's like I sort of have these audio tracks I listen to when I'm working and I have like these special tracks like liquid work, right? Oh, yeah. If I really get something done, I just plug them in. I just tune out and like my mind just gets in the zone. And so music has a huge impact on my mood and my focus. So it really is important to me.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I have a troubleshooting playlist on Spotify. It's just the one that I go to whenever I'm at the bench and, you know, need to.

Dave Jones: I must be the odd one out here. I can do that all without music. You know, I can get in the zone and. Wow. I'm sure you're singing inside your head, Dave. Come on. You're probably singing. I love the podcast on the live thing the other day. I was whistling the Indiana Jones tune. Yeah, I heard about that. I was building my MakerBot. Nice. So, yeah. Well, there you go. It helps. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I can dig it. So post Michigan, you went to, you've been a, you're an MITer, right? I mean.

Bunny: Yeah. Yeah. I spent 10 years there getting three degrees, which is pretty sad. I'm sure a lot of people say that, right? Well, no, I mean, it's just, you know, I sort of hid in this little corner of the world, my little, this little ivory tower. Right, yeah. I actually, I actually went back to get my PhD after going to industry for a year because I was totally disillusioned. Like I, like all through undergraduate and master's, I was like, oh, I'm going to work for Silicon Graphics. I always wanted to work in graphics, visualization, computers, and so excited. I, you know, I got it, got the interview, got the job. And after six months of working there, the, the cubicle farm was like so empty, so decimated that I had to walk around to like turn on the lights. Because what happened, everyone from SGI in my group had gone to these little startups called NVIDIA and ATI, which were, you know. Right. Yeah, you've heard of those now, right? But, you know, back then I was just a new guy who came along like, where did everyone go? Everyone just left, right? Guys. And, and, and so, and so after the end of the echo, yeah, after the end of a few months and, and, and sitting there totally by myself in this empty building essentially with like a couple of other people trying to struggle to get a chip out, I was like, this is lame. I guess I'll, I'll go back to school and figure out what I really want to do.

Speaker ?: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I would, I think a lot of people would have made that decision. I mean, like that's, that's a tough first jump.

Bunny: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so I went back and so it was sort of like this, um, actually the, my, getting my PhD is the best years of my life. I just totally like, I was like, you know what, every, everything, everyone told me in my entire life was wrong. I need to figure out what my life really is. And, and so I spent a lot of time just, you know, with personal, not, you know, cause you know, that's an undergraduate and graduate and masters was just like grades and focusing on like projects and just trying to, you know, just get the A and that sort of thing. And that turns out actually to be really irrelevant. You know, that was just, that was like, uh, and then graduate student, I had this awesome PhD advisor, let me do what I want to do. And I just sort of like, you know, woke up at 3 PM every day and sort of like, you know, went out and went to the bars and chased women and did all those kinds of things. And, and then, you know, sort of, you know, found a lot more about myself along the way. So that was really important. And then, yeah.

Dave Jones: And what did you end up doing as your PhD?

Bunny: I, I, I did a PhD in computer architecture. So we, you know, sort of looking at, um, massively parallel machines. Like the question was, so this was in 2001, you know, you know, roll the clock for 10 years and look at where Moore's law is going to be and, and what the limitations are and, and what kind of computer would you design that in that scenario? And, and what would the new paradigm be? And so it was a little bit of crystal ball gazing and simulation and bits and pieces and trying to come up with, um, you know, what, what things would look like at that time.

Dave Jones: So were you correct back then? That's a good question.

Bunny: Looking forward. Yeah. It's, uh, I, I, you know, I, I, the good news is, I mean, Moore's law definitely moved along the way we had generally predicted to go. Um, I, I had, in, in my thesis, you know, generally, you know, multi-core was definitely going to happen and that did happen. Um, yeah. And the, you know, the primary limitation systems is going to be, you know, memory bandwidth, latency. Those are all, all real today. Um, I was thinking there would be more, uh, architectural innovation to try and address these things. So there'd be new programming paradigms and, and languages that would help with parallelism and multi-threading and, you know, continuations and all these different things. Um, that didn't happen as much. They're still doing a lot of traditional things and using the cores rather inefficiently today.

Chris Gammell: So, um, so you were saying even move away from the, the standard kind of like Harvard architecture, that kind of stuff and move into whole new. Yeah.

Bunny: Well, I, I guess, I guess the thesis had proposed was the idea of the thesis was to propose an architecture that is alternate that would help address these issues. So, you know, um, it, I don't want to go too much into details of it because, because it's, you know, a lot of stuff to talk about, but basically the idea was that, um, the, the idea was to create a very, um, massively multi-threaded, um, kind of, uh, execution paradigm where essentially you can take stack frames and migrate them from CPU to CPU. So you could have like a thousand, um, CPUs say inside of a box. And the idea was that it was actually faster to migrate the register set. So the register state itself would be, you know, 30 registers or 60 registers, how many it is compared to the thread state, which could be a bunch of heap data and a bunch of stack data. And so if you were, if you had a, a thread running on the wrong CPU, you would pay a lot of latency getting to that memory that's far away. So your question was, do you want to move the memory or do you want to move the CPU? And so the idea was that we'd actually move the CPU closer because the CPU state's actually quite compact compared to the memory. And so, so it was, it was a system that was designed that was, that would allow you to very quickly and effectively migrate the CPU state between, um, you know, to where the memory was basically those looking

Chris Gammell: along all this other first responder model kind of, it's like, yeah, yeah. And as much

Bunny: of stuff in resource allocation and, you know, online processing to figure out was, you know, when do you do the move and when was it, you know, worthwhile? When would you lose? And all this theoretical crap that, you know, you know, that no one ever really cares about the end. So when'd you get in Silicon? Um, yeah, so Silicon actually was, was again, you know, my whole life has been this sort of random walk of, of different things. I like to say I get myself a new PhD every four years anyways, um, whether or not it's in school. Um, so when I, when I actually, when I graduated, um, I didn't do anything at all with computer architecture because that field essentially, one of the conclusions I got on the PhD was that there's, there's computer architecture is a dead field. There's been all these great papers on it. Um, and, but no one ever builds anything because Intel is just so good at building chips, right? There's why would you spend four years of your life labor on something? And by the time you got it out, it was out of date because Intel had built something that was eight times faster than what you had started with. Right. Yeah. Right. And they always play on the,

Chris Gammell: the process efficiencies too, right? Yeah. Yeah. So is that why they don't make any big

Dave Jones: changes? You think like, like the stuff you were talking about, is it because they just want these little incremental changes? They don't want to take risk on a huge big, you know, to change the entire way that the process of works, as you said, moving the processor

Bunny: around and close to the memory instead of vice versa. Is that, that's spot on. I mean, backward compatibility, running your code that you have today and just trying to, you know, turn the crank on Moore's law and just get the process a little faster. I mean, that is just, I mean, it just totally makes business sense. Right. And, um, yes, money. There's the game.

Dave Jones: That's the entire game, right. Is, is having to play that. Yeah. Absolutely. So there's almost no room for innovation almost. Right. Major innovation. Right. Right. That's right. Moore's law has sort of

Bunny: compressed innovation into this very narrow window of time where essentially you have to do the whole stack within, you know, months these days, maybe years at best if you, and you have to show an improvement that's compelling in that period of time. There is, there is this sort of little mini paper I wrote in my blog about the slowing down of Moore's law and, um, the slowdown of Moore's law is, um, relatively inevitable in my opinion, um, because there's physics and that's going to slow things down. And, um, and once Moore's law actually starts slowing down, you're going to start seeing a resurgence in innovation again, in things like computer architecture and, and other, um, areas. So I think actually it'll be, it's going to, there's going to be a healthy sort of like, um, not really a rebirth, but sort of a renaissance of, of, you know, of, uh, good, good ideas coming out again that can come on play once, you know, the juggernaut of Moore's law actually loses some steam. And that's purely because

Dave Jones: these cycle times will now be longer. You have more freedom, I guess, to, you know, you've got a longer amount of time to prove that something is viable and rather than, right. So if you, if you got it,

Chris Gammell: I was going to say that happens these days with, uh, with, with silicon in the analog world too, with the, you know, when they run out of silicon stuff on a node, when they run out of, run out of juice, they start looking at packaging until they finally make a jump and the packaging becomes a

Bunny: limiting factor then. Yeah. Yeah. You start seeing people move into other areas of innovation than silicon. And, and so, I mean, if you get to the point, say, where you knew that the laptop that you had is not going to get any faster for eight years because the last eight years, it didn't move anywhere. And there's some big jump and you got the new one. You're like, okay, well, so, you know, my, my machine isn't getting any faster. It's not getting more RAM. What do I do? Well, I could spend four years developing, optimizing compilers and code things. I mean, that's a good bit of time, right? I mean, but four years is huge, right? And so all of a sudden you, you start thinking more, a little more differently about optimization, you know, hand, hand coded assembly routines actually start making sense now because you get, you know, big performance gains out of it. And, and, and, you know, you could start actually talking about doing architectures that require a lot of, you know, manpower investment in time, you know, and it's like, you know, I think the world will, will get actually more interesting for the small innovators in sort of a, what I call post moral, post Moore's law space, because, you know, the, the big companies like Intel and so forth are, you know, kind of, well, you know, what do we do? We're not turning, we can't keep on turning the crank anymore, but we'll see, we'll see what happens.

Chris Gammell: And we've seen, you had a talk on that, didn't you? Was that at the open source hardware convention?

Bunny: Yeah, that's right. That's right. That's right. Yeah. And then the other talks thesis was that, you know, open source, um, the slowdown Moore's law would be good for open source hardware and innovation because, because, you know, there's, there's going to be more of a value on sharing and, and you have more time to build community between cycles and it would make more sense to consolidate around open platforms like, you know, open chassis for laptops and so forth. Because right now it would be, it'd be crazy to sort of build an open laptop chassis because every two years or one year, the heat sinks change and the socket formats change. Everything changes right so quickly. And, but when things sort of slow down a bit, you can sort of say, okay, we're going to invest in like, you know, this common tool that everyone can use in a mechanical form factor. We can start building, you know, plug and play around this. Yeah. A lot of things change, I think.

Chris Gammell: I remember when, when, right after that talk came out, we had contested some of your points in there, but I, I, I feel sheepish that we don't have them up now.

Dave Jones: Yeah, that's true. I remember that. I can't, I don't remember details, but I remember us doing that. I don't think we entirely agreed perhaps.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. That's well.

Dave Jones: In some aspect of it. That's fine. Yeah. I can't remember.

Chris Gammell: Let's see if I can find it, but.

Bunny: That would be embarrassing, wouldn't it? I would love, I would love to debate it if you, if you have, if you have some alternate points of view, it'd be really, I would love to hear it. So.

Chris Gammell: Well, I think, I think one thing that's interesting about that is like when you do reach that point where Moore's law slows down, you start to move into like lower costs, everything anyways, right? Because you start having efficiencies and manufacturing, whatever else. And at that point you start seeing innovation, not necessarily in like the design space, but you see it in the use space. So if now a chip was, you know, a hundred bucks to start with and it goes down to a dollar, right? Someone might just throw 10 of those chips on a board, right? Absolutely. That gets a whole different architectural view, right? Right. That's a little different then.

Bunny: Right. But that, again, sort of favors, you know, more of like this, like it used to be if I'm going to put 10 of these chips on the board, that would be a multi-month process to put 10 chips on the board and you have to bring them up and get it working, get the software going. And by the time you actually got 10 chips on the board working, a lot of times you already had 10 cores on the, or 10 times the CPU power, right? You know, and, and you'd sell your system, be like, why would I want your 10 chip thing? It's 10 times more chips, 10 times more power, it's 10 times more expensive than my one chip solution. And, and so, you know, I, I, I, you know, I totally think that, you know, now when you're starting putting 10 chips on the board, that really favors again, like, you know, small entrepreneurs getting together to, to build these kinds of things, which is, and we're putting more chips on the board as a sort of a thing that individuals can do, putting more transistors in silicon is the only companies can do. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So. True.

Dave Jones: So tell us how you got started in the hardware business. Was, was Chumbie the first hardware thing you were actually involved with actually producing or was there something before that?

Bunny: Well, so I guess, I guess, you know, producing is a, is a, is a question. What do you mean by that? But I'll give you the answer to that.

Dave Jones: Well, you know, it's making something available for a mass.

Bunny: Right. Like outside.

Dave Jones: For, you know, more than just doing it for yourself, not actually doing a one-off, getting involved in the production side of electronics manufacturing and all that sort of thing.

Bunny: Right. Right. So Chumbie was the first, well, you know, one that you actually heard of. Right. I've had a long series of, you know, failures in my past and, and I, and I continue to keep on failing, which it seems to be one of my specialties. That's a good thing. Yeah. And so when I, when I first got out of, you know, for, I mean, there's SGI, which was a failure. And then that was supposed to be something that people would use. And then the, I worked for a company called Mobilion doing 802.11 BG chip sets. So it was my first taste in the silicon. I was designing the analog backend chip. I was on that team doing a little mixed signal design. I did that for a couple of years. That company went under. And then from there I went to a company called Luxtera, which does nanophotonic integrated circuits. So we're building, you know, 40 gigabit per second DWDM, you know, optical multiplexers on a single piece of silicon using some gnarly silicon process stuff. That's when I really got in the silicon side of things. And all these things were ultimately meant to go into production. So, you know, in, in the process of getting, doing silicon design, you actually get exposed to a lot of really good discipline around testing and validation. Yeah. And, and the extremely high costs of running silicon puts a huge amount of emphasis on the design validation front end before you ever tape out a chip. You can't afford to spend a million dollars and be like, oops, it doesn't turn on. Let's have another million bucks to do it again, right? Yeah. You know, and it's, you know, it's very hard to patch chips too, as well. So it's like, you know.

Chris Gammell: Oh, V equals IR. Damn it. I got that again.

Bunny: Every time. Resistant drop. Oh, we should make the bus wires bigger for power. Dang. Probably I had one of the simulation on, anyways. So, yeah, you try to avoid that.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Bunny: And, yeah. Yeah. And then, you know, so there was sort of like this, you know, luck stereos for this phase I had of sort of chasing the coolest technology in the world. And, and, and I got a, got a paper out of that and ISCC, which was awesome. And then, but there was no money in it, right? It's sort of like, you know, if, if I could make a 40 gigabit ethernet chip for you today, you would pay 50 cents more for it in your laptop because you already have a gigabit thing and you don't have any 40 gigabit to plug it into and wants to increment the value of 40 gigabits. I mean, it's kind of, eh. You know. Marginal utility, that whole thing. Yeah.

Bunny: And the whole, and the whole market for 40 gigabit ethernet is sort of dominated by people who actually have dark fibers going to the home that can support single mode, you know, and, and that's like, you know, not a lot of people, right? So, so driving the cost of those down by a factor of a thousand did not, you know, amplify the market by a thousand. It was a bad, bad business in the end.

Chris Gammell: Right. Well, unless you sell the fiber along with it, right? Right.

Bunny: Yeah. We had rights of way around the world for fiber. Yeah. Yeah. So, so after, after kind of, you know, getting a little frustrated with that enterprise, I, I decided, you know, the opportunity came along to join Chumbie and that was just more of a business focused play, right? And so consumer electronics, build stuff, put it out there, you know, low cost. And I was like, you know what? You know, it's definitely, definitely time. I actually definitely put something in the market, right? I just can't keep on doing these hero projects that never actually make it to the market. Right. Yeah.

Dave Jones: So Chumbie wasn't something that you started. It was, it was already around and you joined them. Is that the, how it worked?

Bunny: Yeah, it's a, it's a, yeah, I'm part of the founding team, but really, really, you know, the, you know, the, the, the person who sort of got us together was the, was the, you know, the lead investor. And so he was, he's a great guy. I love working with him. And, and he basically sort of had these dinners once a week where he sort of got a bunch of people together. We talked about sort of the future of wireless, right? So this is back in the day when, you know, when we started Chumbie, the best thing you could do with wifi was replace the ethernet cable on your laptop. There's nothing else you would do with wifi. It's like, okay, you know, what's the value of this $200 box and you've got to walk around your house. And so the observation was like, you know, what if you could put like this wifi thing on the wall that could like deliver web content to you? Like, oh, that's really interesting. What would I do with like a wifi powered alarm clock or wifi powered picture frame? Right. And so, and so we started, you know, riffing on that and trying to develop, you know, sort of app store paradigms. And this was all before like, you know, iPhone came out and stuff. And, um, so what year, your timeframe was it? Um, it was around 2005, I think. Okay. 2006 ish. Like it was a year before the iPhone came out. I remember, or maybe a year and a half. Um, and when the iPhone came out, that was a big sort of turning point for our business because we're like, okay, well there's, there's apps. It's in your pocket. It looks pretty good. So, so we had to sort of, you know, pivot on the business model at that point in time. But, um, but, uh, and then there's the financial crisis of 2008, which basically put everyone in life support mode and, and, you know, small businesses who were struggling at the time. Um, but, uh, but, you know, as, as part of the thing, you know, my, the, the team was primarily software guys for, you know, basically softer people, business development guy. And then me as a hardware guy, kind of like, you know, turn the wheel on the side and say, yeah, you know what, uh, I can build hardware, you know, just, just let me add them. I'll go to China. I'll figure it out. And, and, you know, and they were willing to trust me to do that, which is awesome because at the time I had no credential at all of being able to do it, figuring it out, bumbling around the dark. Um, and, uh, and so, yeah, I hopped on a plane, went out to China, talked to some manufacturers, figure it out, you know, you know, got the supply chain together, built the hardware, blah, blah, blah. And, and, you know, now you know about Chumbie and, and you can buy one and use it. Um, and that was great. I mean, it was really, you know, I can now say that I, I, I really built something in a, in a good volume and, and I can say that, you know, it was good, good statistics on, on the yield and I've had to deal with returns and reverse logistics and the whole kind of business that the end of things was really great exposure to that. So, so how many Chumbies did you end up saying? Yeah, I was going to ask that too. Um, I think, you know, I mean, no, no, yeah, I think, I think all toll about like a hundred thousand or something like that. It's not a huge number.

Dave Jones: That's still pretty good volume. That's, you know, for a niche sort of product. Yeah. It's big enough.

Bunny: Yeah. It's big enough that there's, that, um, you know, good statistics can be said, you know, solid statistics can be said about the production quality.

Chris Gammell: Oh, Sigma, right?

Bunny: Right. Yeah. You can start saying things about this. You know, if you build a hundred and you say, oh, I, you know, I have like, you know, 5% yield success because only five failures. Ah, a hundred units, right? What can you say, right? When you build them on lots of 10,000, right, you can really start saying more.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Unless you get through a couple of reels and start seeing the shift between reels. Yes, you're not. Yeah. Right, right.

Bunny: So that, we got to that point where we're starting, you know, going through multiple reels of components on the line and, and, and, and start to see process shift and dealing with, you know, under life and obsolescence and all these kinds of crazy things that you have to deal with, which is, which is great. And you sort of get that exposure.

Chris Gammell: That's, that's when you're supposed to run away. That's, that's no fun at all.

Bunny: Well, I wanted, you know, I really wanted to, to, to, you know, I think that was part of my, my personal goal in Chummy was really sort of. To be able to pick up any box and I can, you know, first of all, look at it and say, this is how it was made really.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, that's cool.

Bunny: And to say, you know, this is how you would do it. And so I also learned like injection molding and plastic design and as part of, you know, while I was at Chummy, that was really also a great thing to pick up as well. So. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Is that, was that your start of living? Cause you now live in Singapore. Is that right?

Bunny: Yes. I live in Singapore now. That's right.

Dave Jones: Is that a, is that a life decision, like a career decision, life decision? It's a life decision. Why the shift from the U.S.?

Bunny: Yeah. It's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, I would say, you know, basically the observation was I moved while I was at Chummy and, and the observation was I was spending three months a year anyways in China. And, and there's, and there's one of these things about working with factories in China is that they always know that no matter how bad they screw up, you got to hop on an airplane and it takes like two days to get there and it's a couple thousand dollars of overhead. And so they always had the sort of long leash to kind of muck around a bit. Right. I come to Singapore. What you going to do about it? Yeah. I'm in the same time zone now. I'm three hours away and a very cheap plane ticket. So, you know, if they're, if they're not behaving well, they know I'm going to be there, you know, on their doorstep within a few hours. Right. So, yeah. So I, I think, you know, it really sort of helped get me more into the thick of the manufacturing that I really want to get into. And the other thing I, when I first went to, went to China is I discovered Chenzen and electronics market. And I was like, oh my God, this is the center of my universe. I didn't realize it.

Chris Gammell: I remember seeing your post on that. And I remember I probably sent that post to like 20 different people and just being like, oh my God, you have to see this. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's going in a box. It's awesome. I think you posted that. Was that right? Sorry? Was that 07 you posted that?

Bunny: That Chenzen video? Maybe earlier. I don't remember when. I can look it up. But it was a while ago. It's okay. Yeah. It was a few years back.

Chris Gammell: I remember looking at it though and just being like, yep, he made the right choice.

Dave Jones: Well, why Singapore instead of Shanghai or Shenzhen right in the middle of the, you know?

Bunny: Well, I would say it's one of those things where I'd spent enough time in China to know that if I lived in China, I would kill myself. So, I would either work too hard. I would drink too much. Something would happen to me if I was in China. You know, cab rides alone would probably kill me and people just don't ride them. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: You'd die slowly over 20 years from air pollution, that kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. Yeah.

Bunny: So, I wanted to get close enough to it to be able to influence it, but not so close that I was, you know, swimming in it. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. And giving up a lifestyle. Yeah. I've been to both places. I would much rather live in Singapore than Shanghai or Shenzhen any day. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: And so, a lot of your manufacturing is in the Shenzhen area. Is that right? I mean, you have to tell us where, but...

Bunny: Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, there's a... That's the hot spot, right? Yeah. It is the hot spot. I mean, pretty much every... You know, it's ground zero for every... I mean, you know, Dongguan, Guangzhou, you know, Shenzhen area, everything, you know, that's the center of the manufacturing world. Yeah. Yeah. It's amazing. Yeah.

Dave Jones: So, how often did you have to make the trip there? You said you were spending three months a year there or something? Yeah. Was that like you'd go there for three months and park yourself there and watch a production run or were you just flying back and forth?

Bunny: A thousand paper cuts. It was like, you know, two weeks at a time, three months a year.

Chris Gammell: Oh, right. Yeah. Frequent flyer miles, like crazy. Not worth it.

Bunny: Yeah. Yeah. I had an insane amount of frequent flyer miles. I didn't want to talk about how many of those cards I have now. Yeah. And I'm starting to lose those now that I'm out here. It's like, oh, I don't fly as much anymore. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: But at that point, you don't want to use them because you've been on a plane so much, right? I'm going to fly, China. Like, come on, guys. The last thing I want to do is get on a plane. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Oh, boy. I can certainly understand it because I just, probably, I think we talked about this a couple of weeks ago, Chris, on here I was going to go to the US. Now I've decided not to go to the US just because.

Chris Gammell: Well, as Dave said, it's 40 hours of plane, which is exactly a work week, which I had never thought of before. And that's crazy.

Dave Jones: Just to get there and back is an entire work week.

Bunny: It is. Yeah.

Dave Jones: You know, it's just, yeah, it's crazy.

Bunny: And there's a disruption of your sleep schedule and all that sort of. Yeah, bend the hole. Yeah. Yeah. Although one thing I have to say.

Dave Jones: Yeah, I had to weigh up the benefits, you know.

Bunny: One thing I have to say on airplane rides is I do get a lot of work done because I'm forced to be unplugged for about 20, 24 hours total, you know.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Bunny: And then during that period of being unplugged, I get a lot of board layout done.

Chris Gammell: I was doing board layout on a plane the other day. I was flying home from Arizona.

Dave Jones: See, I can't do that. I can't sleep on planes and I can't work on planes. Really? I'm just going to want to be dumb entertained. And Dave doesn't drink either. I just want to be sitting there like a zombie watching 10 movies back to back.

Bunny: Thank you very much. No, I get in the airplane. I just get in the zone. I put in the liquid work, you know, and listen to the music, put in the headset and just start laying out boards. And then, you know, before I know it, you know, the students is like, why don't you go to sleep? Everyone's asleep. I'm like, I'm getting the next time zone just by working through it, right? Yeah, exactly. Plus, as good as everybody else is asleep.

Chris Gammell: Because then they don't give you the look, you know, like, oh, what's that guy doing? Yeah, that's right. Yeah, these kids would come up to me and be like, what game are you playing?

Bunny: Those looks, you're really into it. You show them? Yeah, this is called circuit board layout. And, you know, I'm using Altium. And so I'd like this 3D view and I'd like to start rotating around the circuit board. And it's like, wow, it's like Tron. I'm like, no. It's all right. Oh, that's great.

Dave Jones: Oh, that's brilliant. Yeah. Oh, there's a game model if there ever was one, right?

Bunny: Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Sell a million copies, right? Yeah, right.

Bunny: There's another thing that always gets people to ask me questions. When I'm doing 3D mechanical design in an airplane, people love it, right? Oh, yeah. Because they actually watch me, like, you know, extrude things and cut holes. They start looking like a real product by the time I'm done with the flight.

Dave Jones: And they go like, what are you building over there? That's really cool, right? I know. I'm building a new part for the plane that's about to crash.

Chris Gammell: That's a good answer.

Dave Jones: And I've got my 3D printer here. I can just churn it out.

Chris Gammell: It's in the overhead.

Dave Jones: Make repairs on the fly.

Chris Gammell: That's right. Oh, man. So, over in China, I mean, I had some questions just about, you know, when I see these videos in the market and everything, in Shenzhen, and actually, Ian from Dangerous Prototypes is over in Akibara. And so, I was watching that one, too. And how often is it like, oh, I'm just going to pop down to the store and get another reel of resistor? Is it like that? Or is it just, like, what is the real function of that? Is it for manufacturing every day?

Bunny: The open market? Yeah.

Dave Jones: Those open markets, yeah.

Bunny: The open market is, it's more like, yeah, I'm just going to pop down and buy a reel of resistors. I mean, it serves, you know, sort of designers and volume manufacturers. And then, primarily, the open market there serves in gray market components. So, you'll find very few brand name things you can actually trust there. And gray market means things like, you know, manufacturer bought. They're not, it's not, it's gray. It's not black.

Dave Jones: They aren't necessarily fake.

Bunny: Yeah, they're not fake. It's like, you know, manufacturer had to do 12,000 units and they had a reel of 3,000 left at the end. And they can't use that anymore after a certain date code has passed. And so, they sell it to someone who will sell it for them. You go to the gray market and, you know, they'll sell you half reels or, you know, if I want to buy 1,000 crystal oscillators, normally either 3,000 to a reel. You can go to the gray market and buy them just 1,000 of them. And the chick will just go there and she'll just pull a reel and go, shh, shh. And like all these like components come flying off and she's like, pulls out a meter stick and like, okay, that's about 1,000 steps for your sticks on the reel and says, here you go. You know, they're 8 cents a piece. You're like, okay, fabulous. Right? That's, you know. Yeah. That is pretty fabulous.

Chris Gammell: And that's kind of like the analog over here is like, is a brokered parts. That's, I mean, that's what they call gray market over here too, at least. You know, you go out to the network, to the internet and you say, oh, there's 800 pieces. There's no guarantee to them, but you know, they're there. Yeah. So, if you want to try them, you know, you're welcome to.

Bunny: Right. That's exactly right. Yeah. Yeah. And then, you know, of course, of course in the gray markets, in Shenzhen, they're much less scrupulous about representing brands. So, a lot of times you walk through these markets and you'll see people taking, like they even do this for resistors. I was shocked. They were, they were taking generic resistors, peeling the sticker off of them and then sticking on like a Samsung brand on them. Like they just sit there and like, you walk up and they're like, I like to buy some resistors. And they're like, oh, would you like to buy some of these Samsung resistors? I'm like, I see you taking the sticker off of the generic ones and putting the Samsung brand on them. And you want to sell me that was a brand name. Yeah, but they're only 50% more.

Dave Jones: That's amazing.

Chris Gammell: That's awesome. And so, do you buy them?

Bunny: I buy them. Yeah. I mean, they work. Why not? I just, you know, I bargain the hell out of them. I'm like, these are not brand name. These are generic. And she goes, oh, you got me here.

Speaker ?: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Two bucks for the real. So, what about bargaining? I mean, is it a lot of haggling and such like that too? I mean, could you get a tray of FPGAs for bare bottom prices kind of thing or what?

Bunny: FPGAs. So, the market, FPGAs would be tougher. I wouldn't buy FPGAs in the market, to be honest, because they're almost always going to be not brand new parts. They'll be used parts taken off of existing assemblies.

Dave Jones: Oh, ouch.

Bunny: Yeah. They do a lot of reballing and recycling there of things. And particularly when you get to the more expensive components, like anything above like $10 for a component, it gets really dicey to buy it there. But, you know, like the other day, I was searching for these. These LED strings are waterproof that you can buy, multicolor, you know, kind of reels and tape them on stuff. I had a friend who was looking for some of those. And so, yeah, I walked around the market and shopped around and haggled people down, got like 30% off. And ultimately, the price I can get out there is better than any price you can get on the internet by a factor of two. But definitely, there's a lot of haggling that you do. You just sort of, you know, there's this one lady who has wanted to sell it to me for 90 RMB. And I walk around and the other one is selling it for 75. I say, well, this person is selling it for 75. Will you give it to me for it?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Go back and forth. I mean, in that way, it's just like a regular market. I mean, you do that with fruit markets and everything else, too. Yeah, totally. Yeah.

Dave Jones: How does the Singapore market compare to Shenzhen? Because I've been to, what is it? The Simlin Tower? Simlin Tower.

Speaker ?: Yeah, Simlin Tower.

Dave Jones: Simlin Tower.

Bunny: Right.

Dave Jones: Yeah, it's the main one, isn't it, in Singapore? Yeah, yeah. That's right. That's the main. Yeah. Yeah. I think... How does that compare with the Aki Barbers?

Bunny: Yeah. I would say the thing about the Singapore market is they sort of got locked in a time warp. If you want to go to the 1980s and buy...

Dave Jones: That's the impression I got. Yeah.

Bunny: Yeah. Yeah. So, I think that basically what happened is they had a booming business in electronics here in the 80s, and then a lot of that migrated to China, and a lot of inventory got left behind in the 80s, and it's still on the shelf.

Dave Jones: There's a lot of Z80 processes there. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: So, when you hit your obsolete components, you know where to go, right? Yeah. I might call you for that.

Dave Jones: Well, because a lot of the Apple clones and all the early microcomputer clones, they all came out of Singapore, didn't they, I think? They were... That was a huge market back then. No, I don't... They were just churning out these...

Bunny: Huh?

Dave Jones: Oh, you're too young. Am I showing my age again?

Bunny: Am I? Well, I had an Apple II clone, but I was... Yeah. I was of the age where I had not taken an airplane flight yet.

Dave Jones: All right. Oh, boy. Singapore. So, we've got some questions, I think, though.

Chris Gammell: Audience questions, yeah.

Dave Jones: Audience questions.

Chris Gammell: Our questions are crap, but audience questions are always good, so... Sure. Yeah. So, I mean, a lot of people were interested in your FPGA experience. I don't know if you wanted to give a rundown of just kind of the stuff you've done in the past and how... I mean, people are asking about brands and stuff like that, too, but, you know, like, it seems like a lot of your work is very heavily FPGA-based, and just maybe your methodology behind it and what you like about them, what you don't like about them, and how you're using them these days.

Bunny: Yeah, well, I guess, I mean, I love FPGAs. I mean, they're awesome as a designer to be able to use these things. You know, for a while, I did chip design, so I didn't need to use FPGAs, but I used them for validation vehicles in chip design. When I was in Chumbie, actually, I couldn't use FPGAs because they're just too expensive, you know, for a consumer electronics product. Except when I got to the NETV, when I was looking at costing out, you know, HCI transmitters and receivers, because of a quirk of the market, it actually turned out to be cheaper to an FPGA than buy two chips, right, and stick them on there for the HDMI stuff. So, that actually made sense.

Dave Jones: I found that.

Bunny: Yeah. So, that actually made sense from the cost standpoint, and I was just super stoked. I was like, I'm going to put an FPGA in this thing, damn it. I'm going to love it, right? Yeah, right? I'm badass, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Then you get the automatic upgrade path, too, right? That's one of my favorite parts.

Bunny: Yeah. I was stoked to be able to put an FPGA in the design again. So, I'm definitely prejudiced towards Xilinx's, and that goes a long way back. When I was in college, Xilinx was very generous and provided tools and parts, and I did my thesis using Xilinx parts and so forth. And, you know, I remember their generosity well. Yeah. I really, and to this day, I really like working with their stuff. And, you know, I actually got a chance to meet with a bit of some of the Xilinx chip designers and the Altera chip designers back then. And one of the things that kind of struck me, I don't know if it's true today anymore, but back in that point, Altera was very focused on using FPGAs as an ASIC replacement, low cost, sort of like that mid-volume ASIC tier replacement. So, they were really shooting for low cost and sort of bare-bone features. And at the same time, Xilinx is going more towards like reprogrammability, you know, partial reconfigurability, a lot more features on I.O. and so forth in their devices. And for me, like, you know, I didn't really care so much about replacing ASICs. I really wanted a really feature-rich device that supported all these, you know, cool things. And so, I was really much more excited about, you know, the Xilinx philosophy overall back then. And I don't know how it is today because I don't even look these days on the Altera side of the camp, actually, to be honest. I'm like, ah, this is Altera, guys. They may do something good. I don't know. I just, I'll use the Xilinx part, right?

Chris Gammell: No, and that brand loyalty is, it's very common. I mean, I talk to both salesmen whenever I talk to them and they're just like, yeah, you know, we walk into these places and it's usually just a crapshoot for them because it seems like Xilinx, there's Xilinx houses, there's Altera houses, there's Actel houses, and that's it. You're just kind of, unless it's something special.

Dave Jones: It's not easy to move from one to the other. So, you know, on a brand new complex design, you're used to the architecture and the tools and the bugs and everything else on one brand. It's the bugs you have to get used to. Yeah, that's right.

Chris Gammell: That's right. It's not trivial. I have put so many reports in, goddammit, I'm sticking with it. Yeah, yeah.

Bunny: You really, you really, you really.

Chris Gammell: Come hell or high water.

Bunny: You know, you get really used to the quirks of like, you know, defining pins in one particular model or, you know, the IO standard problems or the way the clock distributed network is like weird in this way and you just know it, right?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I don't want to have to use a quirk, but it's my quirk.

Bunny: Yeah.

Speaker ?: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah, it's a bit different with microcontrollers. I just haul myself to the cheapest brand, you know, whichever I just, I'm just designing something today. I'll probably do a video about it. I need a cheap microcontroller to drive an LCD. I go through my parametric search, which is the cheapest brand that'll do that? Yeah. I don't care whether it's Atmel, Pick or Ti or bloody anyone else.

Chris Gammell: Or if you went to the market, it would be the blank one, right, Dave?

Dave Jones: Yeah, that's right.

Chris Gammell: What if you can buy it?

Dave Jones: One hung low brand. Yep. Yeah. So, you know, whereas, and, you know, because it's so easy to retool and reskill between microcontrollers, but FPGAs are, you know, order of magnitude more complex in their, just the tools and the configuration and the learning curve. Yeah.

Bunny: Eight gigabytes of my hard drive devoted to one version of Xilinx tools, right? Yeah. I want an eight gigabytes of my hard drive for Altera, right?

Speaker ?: Yeah.

Dave Jones: That's right.

Bunny: Yeah. Oh, boy. That's how they lock you in. They're just going to make a hundred gigabyte package, so you can't afford to put two tools in there.

Chris Gammell: They keep getting bigger. Last time I put one on, it was 13. 13 gig if you do everything. Oh, that's killer. You need to upgrade, Bunny. Sorry, man. Yeah. I'm using SSDs, so, you know, space is a premium. Really? What do you do that for? Is that for traveling? Is that kind of why?

Bunny: Yeah. I mean, I think there's a couple of things. I mean, the idea of having, like, this flying head, you know, a micron above, like, a cushion of air with a rotating disc just freaks me out, right? You know too much. Yeah. Magnetic, you know, go past an MRI machine and lose all my data. It's just, you know, it's like, I love the robustness of the SSD. You know, I can toss my laptop now and not feel bad about it.

Dave Jones: But you've got to be careful those solid state discs don't use the lowest bidder parts from Shenzhen. Right, right.

Bunny: No, I do spend a lot of money to get the brand name SSDs. Yeah. Yeah. And I back up constantly. Oh, so you hope. Yeah, so I hope. Right. Yeah. All right. I do take them apart before I put them in to make sure that the parts look legit. Really? Oh, okay. Yeah. That's paranoia. Yeah, that's justified. I'm going to put a lot of investment of time and effort into this SSD. SSD. I'm not going to, you know, just trust the manufacturer that this thing I'm going to put all my life's work into is actually what they say it is. I'm going to look at it. Right.

Chris Gammell: Right. Fair call. And that actually brings up some of your other, I mean, so you've been running into this, you know, do you own your own hardware kind of stuff and you've been fighting against this, right, with your newest device, the NETV. Yeah. Can you tell us a little bit about the fight and what you've had to deal with?

Bunny: Well, I mean, so, I mean, NETV wasn't, it's more of a, I guess, more of a theoretical fight. I'm fighting this, you know, nebulous enemy, you know, that represents the DMCA and all these other different things. It's like basically the specter that hangs over a lot of activities in the computer space where if you bump against anything that involves cryptography, you're potentially violating the DMCA because it could also be used to control copyright. And that really is put a crimps on innovation and you can't open your box anymore. And it really sort of really changes the paradigm of how people interact with things. And really, you know, one of the, one of those times when you say like, geez, like this law is really hampering innovation. Because you go to places like China and say, okay, China has terrible IP laws and, you know, they're all criminals and they steal things. On the other hand, they have one of the most fecund market exchange for ideas. People just trading things back and forth. And I see the openness and the, and the, just the, the, the overturn of ideas there and, and how that's, you know, sort of propelling them forward. And I go to the US and I see people like, oh, I can't look at that because it's encrypted or I can't touch that because it's closed or I'm going to avoid the warranty. Or you can't have that data sheet because it's whatever. Yeah, you can't have that data sheet. It's like, oh my God. Like, and it's just like just barriers and barriers. And, and, and when you're in a outright sprint, I mean, we are in a sprint for the top, you know, pole position and innovation. And you go ahead and you tie lead weights in your feet. Yeah, you're the best athlete, but you got lead weights in your feet, man. Like, you know, like it's not helping you. Right. So, yeah. So, you know, I'm trying to, you know, and, and, and, and I think, you know, around the NETV in particular, the, the, the, the trouble with HDMI when I started. So let me actually back up a bit. I'll tell you a little bit where NETV came from, right? So. Please do. We had built an eight inch frame device in Chumbie a couple of years ago and it wasn't selling well because it's too expensive. And if you look at the bomb, the most expensive thing in the bomb is glass, right? LCDs are just freaking expensive with touchscreens on them. People want cap touch and they want multi-touch and you just like, yeah, just tally it up. You're like, this is really expensive. What people want. I can't, can't build something that the market can bear. I go, okay, well, I want to get rid of the glass, right? I want to see how do I, how do I get rid of this screen? And so I started thinking, well, okay, let's, everyone owns a great piece of glass called a TV. And it's got a port I can plug into it.

Chris Gammell: And Samsung has gotten that down really good. Yeah. Big pieces of glass these days. Yeah.

Bunny: Yeah. And I'm like, I'm like, okay, well, what would chumby look like on a TV? I plug it in. Like, okay, Chuck Norris quotes and 40 inch TV. Okay. That's lame after about 30 seconds. You know, it sort of gets boring, right? Okay. That's kind of lame. And you're like, what I really want a TV for is I want to watch TV, not widgets. And so that means I want to be able to blend my app experience with TV, which means, okay, now I do got to do an overlay, right? So there are two options at point was either do I, you know, put content in my box and try to do the blending before I put it to thing, or do I use someone else's box of content and overlay on top of it, right? Being a small company, we don't have content relationships. I can't actually get the right to do that. So the only option I had was to use someone else's content and overlay on top of it. And this is where things get hairy because the content's encrypted over the wire. So the reason why you haven't seen a product like any TV yet is because of that encryption. There's no real sort of legal way to do it without sort of running afoul of the DMCA. So one of the parameters of the product design became a way to do this that was DMCA safe. And so I did a little research on the cryptography and how things went. And, of course, the costing worked out using FPGA versus, like, you know, actual receivers, chips. And I came with a scheme where, in fact, we can do video overlay without ever decrypting the video. So the video itself stays encrypted the entire way through. We never decrypt it. We never load it into a buffer. Instead, we just swap encrypted pixels for newly encrypted pixels. And so even though we're intercepting a key exchange and we're reversing the keys and all that sort of stuff because we never decrypt any video, we just use the keys to encrypt video. It's not a crime to encrypt video.

Dave Jones: You have never seen the content. Yeah. It's not a crime if you haven't seen the content, right? Is that the...

Bunny: Yeah. I mean, right. Well, the crime is to de-scramble data, you know, to defeat a copyright control mechanism. If you never de-scramble the data, the statute doesn't apply, right? Where... Wow. What part of this law applies to what I did? And please point out to me, thank you very much. And you can't actually point to any mechanism where this law could actually apply to. So it's a moot point, right? Right.

Chris Gammell: So could I try and put it like into an analogy, like from how I understand it? It's like if you had a stolen package coming to you, right? And then you took that stolen package and you never opened it. Now, obviously, it's not stolen. But you put it into another box that has its own labeling. That stuff's all still in there, right? And then you add, you know, whatever else, a Twitter feed in with that box. And then you package that up and, you know, write stolen on the top of that box. Is that right? I mean, is that about how it goes?

Dave Jones: Eh, almost. Oh, that's a big complex thing. Maybe.

Speaker ?: I think, yeah.

Bunny: Yeah, I think the thing I would pick a bone with the analogy is the package is never stolen, right? It's on route to the proper... Right, I know that shouldn't have said stolen. It's there. It's publicly available, right? You actually send it to the person that it's going to in the end, right? Okay. And the weird thing is that the package you're talking about, the intended sender and the recipient is the same person. It is your own DVD player going to your own TV. It's not like I am, like, nefariously stealing something that's going between my neighbor's, you know, cable box and my thing. Like, you actually own both ends of the link. Like, you actually probably own the DVD they're using to play. You actually own the player. You actually own the TV. And you have this link in the middle where, you know, if I were to actually open this package I'm saying to myself, it's a crime because you're not allowed to open packages at all, right? I mean, it's illegal to just open the package, right? It's ridiculous, right? And so a package I'm saying to myself across this cable is illegal to open. It's like, God, this is, like, retarded, right? So, you know, essentially it's, you know, it's more of like, you know, you have this package. It's actually thousands of packages that are going to the screen. Each of them is a pixel. Each pixel is a package. What you're doing is the package is going to yourself. You're just throwing away a bunch that you didn't want and putting ones you want in and just delivering them to the TV. Oh, okay. Yeah, that's a good way to say it.

Speaker ?: Yeah.

Bunny: And, you know, it's...

Dave Jones: How do you use the same encryption? How do you encrypt it the same as the already encrypted data?

Bunny: So the HTTP mechanism is a symmetric cipher. The same key is operating on both ends of the cipher. And so there's this, you know, cipher text stream on both ends. So all you have to do is you have to deduce the state of the cipher based upon the initializations and match the cipher that you have inside the overlay to the one that's in the transmitter. Time-wise and state-wise. And then once you're matched up, it's just an XOR operation. And then the receiver, because it's synchronized to both your state and the other transmitter state, doesn't care either. There's no link verification or anything like that going on, like checksums or anything like that. It just happily decrypts everything.

Dave Jones: Right.

Bunny: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Got it. Clever.

Chris Gammell: Very clever. That sounds awesome.

Dave Jones: And you've been able to. So have you had much heat over this or is it, have they all sort of backed off straight away once they realize that you're not doing anything illegal?

Bunny: I don't know. I mean, it's one of those things where I'm so small right now. I'm relevant, right? So it would cost them more to come after me, to be honest. And I don't know. I mean, maybe there's some lawyer sitting in a den somewhere drafting up papers in a complaint against me. And, okay, well, they can come to Singapore and serve them to me, right?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. You know. But if they're listening, they should not do that. If there's any lawyers that happen to listen to the Amp Hour. If there's any lawyers listening to Amp Hour. Yeah, they're probably very different.

Bunny: I mean, you know, the NTV is being manufactured by a company that I started in Singapore, partially because I want to make sure that the jurisdiction for whatever happens is on my side, right? I don't want to have to fly back to the U.S. and deal with, you know, someone serving me in the U.S. So, you know.

Chris Gammell: And the DMCA has power out there? I mean, I don't know anything about the legal stuff. Well, I think they do. Well, yeah.

Dave Jones: They think they have power all over the globe. Oh, watch out.

Chris Gammell: Seriously. He's getting lined up for a rant here. They do.

Dave Jones: They're, you know, they're pushing their boundaries into. It's the same thing with the whole U.S. government. They think they can control the world. Ah, it started.

Chris Gammell: I shouldn't have said anything. It started. Dave, just bear it.

Dave Jones: See, as a non-U.S. person, we notice this stuff.

Bunny: There are treaties and there's a bunch of things that happen that, you know, may make some things apply over here. It could end up being simply that they just block me in customs, right? They could say, you can't ship to the U.S. market because you have an injunction, right? Yes, that would be about the limit. Right. So even if they couldn't get me unnecessarily in the grounds up here to the local laws, they could definitely shut down my market access.

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah.

Bunny: For sure. And then I'd be stuck with a pile of inventory that can't sell because the main market's the United States. That hurts. But, you know, the other thing, the nice thing about using FPGA is I can say, okay, well, you know what? The thing you didn't like, it's gone. Exactly. I don't actually do it with HTTP anymore. So I can just sell these, right, without it in there. And then...

Dave Jones: It's just to sell it as an FPGA development. Yeah.

Bunny: You know, so now what are you going to do, right? You know, come on. You know, show me where the thing is. It's violating your precious stuff, right? Yeah. And then, you know, we can talk about it, right? And then when users get it, they can be like, uh, there's a source code I found on the internet and I compiled.

Chris Gammell: Well, that's like how it goes with even like MP3 stuff. I mean, if you download Ubuntu, you have to get certain encoders because they're not allowed to package them with an Ubuntu installer. And it's like, okay, well, I guess I'll just go get it.

Dave Jones: Wasn't this the same with the Xbox hacking, the thing with the mod chips and all that sort of stuff? I think that even in Australia here, they ruled that actually selling just the mod chip on its own was actually illegal, which is nuts, you know? Right, right. But that's what it got down to. Like even the source code was, you know, it's not the act of actually doing and pirating the thing, but actually selling, you know, even the, you know, the device that allows you to do it.

Bunny: And so there's some legal theory behind this. And one of the things that I think might, I don't know, I'm not familiar with the details of the Australian case, but one of the arguments that is made is if the only viable purpose for something is illegal, the ownership of that therefore must be illegal. Like why do you have like a nuclear bomb, right? You know, that's, there's no reason for you to have it. Therefore, the possession of that is a crime, right? Right. Right. So one of the, one of the really important things about any TV as well is that it actually, there's a, there is a non illegal viable commercial purpose for it, right? That you can use. Is that by design? But by design, by design, right? And so, and so, you know, you can object to it all you want, but you cannot classify it as, as, as simply contraband because of its sole existence. Since there's other things it can do, you would have to really argue before a judge and make your case that the only thing this is useful for is, is violation of some types. And, and so.

Chris Gammell: And then you get to bust into the courtroom and show them all the cool things they could do, right? Check this out.

Dave Jones: Check this out.

Bunny: Well, you know, I, I really hope and never, I, I never really want to go to court and fight any of this. You sort of, you sort of do an abundance of preparation ahead of time to sort of, you know, make it, make it so that it's very difficult to actually bring you there.

Dave Jones: Would it actually get to the point where you actually wouldn't sell it as the NETV? You would sell it as, you know, you would sell it pre-programmed with a game on it or something or. Yeah, I mean, it's. Actually market it as something else, but nudge, nudge, wink, wink. Here's what it can be useful. Well, I would, I would never, I would never do the nudge, nudge, wink, wink.

Bunny: That would be, that would be illegal. It's, it's.

Dave Jones: No, let, let, let other people do the nudge, nudge, wink, wink for you.

Bunny: Yeah, as, as, you know, I can't control people do with it at the back end, right? You know, it's free will. Yeah, that's right. That's right.

Chris Gammell: You shouldn't be talking about the amp power anyways, if that's the case, right? Well, Buddy Wags, that is on the amp power three years ago. Yeah, there you go. I'm going to get myself in court two years from like, shh, why would I say that?

Bunny: God damn it.

Chris Gammell: Why did I talk to those guys?

Bunny: Here I'm on the record now and I'm listening to myself in the courtroom, putting my head in my hands like, ah.

Chris Gammell: I shot myself in the court. That microphone sounds nice.

Bunny: No, you know, I, you know, so one of the things I'm doing right now actually with any TV is, is I'm actually retrofitting it into another design where it's actually, it's, it's, I mean, it's kind of Frankenstein thing. It's merged with a bunch of like motor controllers and digital IO, analog IO. So you can use it. Actually, you know, the intention for this is, is, is to help control robots. Yes.

Chris Gammell: Awesome.

Bunny: Which sort of doesn't really make sense. Why would you have HDMI ports in a robot? Well, you know, if you want to put a monitor, it's a long story. But, uh.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, like telepresence kind of stuff, right? Yeah.

Bunny: Telepresence. Yeah, there's a bunch of stuff you can do with it. I, I think actually, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's one of those things where I need an FPGA anyway in this controller. And if I'm putting FPGA, I might as well put two HDMI ports on it. And, you know, it's. Yeah. You know, um, so that, that product there may become what sort of, um, you know, I, you know, I think can, can survive any sort of legal challenge that may come up, you know, because it really has a ton of other purposes than a TV device. But, um.

Dave Jones: Right.

Bunny: Yeah.

Dave Jones: But it's sold as a TV device.

Bunny: The NETV is. The NETV is. Right.

Dave Jones: Right. And that, that, and that may be the problem. Yeah. It's actually sold as that.

Chris Gammell: The name of the NETV robot, right? Yeah.

Bunny: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Bunny: So, so. Hmm. I don't know. I mean, I, I mean, one of the things about the NETV itself is that, you know, it originally was developed. The concept was originally to be, you know, done with Chumbie. Um, but Chumbie's not really doing hardware anymore. So I, I'm building it myself. Um, and as an individual, like, I'm now having to do customer support and help all these people. And so it was a flood of email going to my, you know, and so, and there's a question of, do I really want to go into, um, sort of a very consumery feeling market and, and, and, and, you know, address all the concerns? Right. I know very well how much it's going to cost to run support and, and, um, and do all this. Or do I really want to stay more with developers and hobbyists and, and, you know, just that, that, that end of the spectrum. And so, you know, I, I'm, I feel, you know, I, I want to be more on, on, you know, working with makers and hobbyists. I really like those people's customers. I love customers who are smarter than me and tell me, you know, you did something wrong and they, you know, I'm like, oh, well, that's great. Don't worry, I fixed the FPGA, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Here's, here's the patch. I'm like, well, you're awesome, right? I love working with you, right? Versus like, oh, you know, I.

Dave Jones: And they, and they understand, you know, you've, you've screwed things up or it's going to take some time or it's going to do this or, or, but please excuse me if I don't personally reply. Maybe the asking on the forum might be a better way to get an answer or something like that. They sort of.

Bunny: A lot of people. Understand that. That's, that's a lot more understanding at that level. Not so like the scream on the phone, like, you know, why isn't my Wi-Fi working today? I'm like. Is it on? Did you, did you, did you type in your key correctly? Is it K-sensitive? You know, it's.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So. Yeah. There's only so much, so much you can handle with that. Yep. I get it too.

Dave Jones: So you want to move more back into niche hobbyist sort of maker field devices then? Yeah.

Bunny: Is that more satisfying? Yeah, I think so. I mean, I, I think, um, uh, it's, it's, it's a, it's a little bit of an, I would say it's more like, um, I would rather have. A couple of good customers who buy a lot of units. So like selling to like industrial medical, you know, those kinds of people who need controllers, you know, good, low cost systems, solid, good software stack. Um, and support them really well. Right. And, and help them innovate rather than sell to like, you know, a million people each with a different configuration and try to figure out all the permutations combinations of like receivers and TVs. And I mean, just the validation lab, I have to buy it to be able to replicate, you know, every combination of component would, would, would just kill me. Right. So, um, so it's, it's, uh, it's, uh, you know, just, I don't know. I, I, I, I'd rather, you know, I, I think one of the things I, I sort of decided at the moment, I, I would rather be happy than be fabulously wealthy at this point in time. Right. So, so, so, so, you know, chasing riches and going for these big consumer products is great, but yet it's a ton of work and, um, I'm a little tired, you know, I want.

Dave Jones: And I, I don't think it's as satisfying. Yeah. Personally. Yeah. But then again, I'm just a nerd. Like, I guess you are and Chris is and everyone else who's listening to us now. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: You know, those are the people we like. So, yeah. Yeah. I mean, and it's sustainable as a business model in order to like, you know, keep operating. Right. I mean, that, that's, that's what it ultimately comes down to. If you can make money at it, enough money at it to keep going, then that's. Yeah.

Bunny: No. That's all that matters. We'll find out. Right. But, you know. But. Well, everybody go buy one right now. Stop listening to this and go buy one. Yeah. Yeah. But, but, you know, I think, I think the thing is, you know, if someone picks up and says, I want to do like a digital signage solution. I mean, I think any TV would be great for like digital signage. Right. It's awesome for, and, and for example, digital signage would be an awesome market for because typically you have a very homogenous installation of a thousand different displays. You know, one customer to deal with and you, you really enable them to, to put smarts into a digital signage solution. That guy will buy enough volume to, to make the business, you know, more worthwhile. Right. Sure. And so, and so you've kind of put out there and hope you're fishing, you hope you find the guy who has like, you know, this volume deployment. And if they don't, that's fine. You still support them, help them. But, you know, they're all along the way, you're sort of building this corpus of knowledge and, and, and support that other people can rely upon. That's great. You know, I, I kind of, that's what I'm hoping to do, you know, with this and, and, you know, it's, it's a very modest goal. It's not crazy or anything like that. I think it's just, I just want to be an engineer, right. For a little while and have fun being an engineer. Right.

Dave Jones: Awesome.

Bunny: Why would you want to be anything else? Yeah.

Dave Jones: No, that's right. I got a question with your, I'm on your hacking the Xbox. Cause you wrote a book called hacking the Xbox. Right. It's a, it's quite famous, I think.

Bunny: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Probably. Was it the first reverse engineering, popular reverse engineering?

Bunny: I don't know. Book out there, maybe? I, I, I haven't really done a citation search for, for reverse engineering books, but.

Dave Jones: But your publisher, Wiley, they, um, uh, candid, didn't they? Yes. Out of fear of the DMCA. Can you tell us about that? They were just, what if they just phone you up one day and said, sorry, we're not, selling this anymore. We're scared shitless.

Bunny: Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. That's, that's about right. I mean, it was, it was one of the weirdest things. Cause like, you know, um, they, they contacted me and they said, here, we'd like to advance you a royalty to write this book. And I worked with the editors. It was great. And, and, you know, you know, typed away at it, you know, four or five months, got the book written, sent the manuscript over. And then they, they revamped by the lawyers and they says, nope, too risky. And I go, risky. Like really? And I said, spend time on this, huh? Yeah. You should have done that. But they were nice enough to let me keep the advance, right? Because they're like, well, you wrote the book. It was a deal. It was a deal. So I said, okay, well, I have this advance. How much does it cost to print a book? And I go, oh, okay. I can print books with this advance. Okay. So I took the advance and printed a bunch of books and stuck them in my garage and opened a website and says, I'll sell it. Right. And then I started selling. And then, and then, uh, fortunately, I mean, selling books is fun for a little while, except at 2 a.m. Again, you get these calls from people like, you know, I ordered this book two days ago and it didn't arrive. And I'm like, oh. And then they're like, you know, where's my book? Like, I don't know. I mean, it's like, I type my computer. And then after a while, the guy goes, wait, I was expecting an operator. It's like, yeah. Are you buddy? And I'm like, yes, I'm like, oh my God, I'm so sorry. I'm like, what are you expecting?

Chris Gammell: I thought you were going to say, he's like, oh, I just checked. It's in my front door. Don't worry about it, man. So, so, so, you know, it's like.

Dave Jones: So you ended up self-publishing only. Is that? No, no.

Bunny: For a little while I did that. And then, but you know, self-publishing was fun for a little while. But again, the 2 a.m. calls for people warning where the book was, was getting tiresome. And a really great guy at No Starch Press, you know, offered to pick it up. And I love his attitude. He's like, yeah, yeah, we do a bunch of books, sir. The Risky, I'm, you know, I'm the boss. If I like it, I'm going to do it. Right. And I was like, I was like, yeah, this guy's got balls. Yeah. I'm going to do it. Okay, fine. Here you go. Yeah. Go for it. And so, you know, he, he, he did it and it was great.

Dave Jones: Well, I can probably say, um, it's not really confidential. Yeah. I've been approached by No Starch to write some books and, um, yeah, I'm not sure if I'm going to do it, uh, yet if I have the time to actually do it and whether or not it's beneficial and all that sort of stuff. So yeah.

Chris Gammell: And after all that video, Dave's not sure he remembers how to write. So yeah.

Dave Jones: Oh boy. So yeah, I don't know. But yeah, they seem very good.

Chris Gammell: Yep.

Dave Jones: Okay.

Chris Gammell: So with the Xbox thing, did you ever see a turnaround kind of like how the Kinect, I mean, I know, uh, the Kinect hacking kind of got a lot of flack from Microsoft and they kind of turned it around. Did they ever come back to you at all? Or did you ever have any interaction with them?

Bunny: Yeah, there was. I mean, I, I think the, um, we sort of nipped this one at the bud. Um, basically, I mean, one of the, one of the nice things about being at MIT is that you have some really smart MIT faculty who are connected. And so they, they sort of connected me to the EFF and, uh, and, and, and I had a conversation with the EFF about what's the right way to approach this. And, and, um, and we, we sent some cordial letters back and forth to Microsoft. And basically before we ever really got to that point, uh, there was a consensus that this was not going to be a problem for them. Right. You know, and that was, that was great. I mean, I think that's, that's, you know, I wish more people would just have civil conversations about things before going to courts about it. Um, or sending in an Astigram or something like that to make you go away. Right. But Microsoft in general has gotten much more enlightened about, um, the, uh, the hacker community. I mean, they have blue hat and the, you know, this, you know, Microsoft is now like inviting hackers essentially to help them improve their products and so forth. And I think that's served them well.

Chris Gammell: I agree. Well, cool.

Dave Jones: Have we got any last minute questions, Chris? Cause our amp hours, well, truly up. We've used up our capacity. Oh yeah.

Chris Gammell: It just flies by. It does. Um, I, you know, I saw a couple of people ask this on the, on the, the page that we had up for, for questions. And I, I was kind of intrigued too. Um, where did you get started with Marvell? I mean, because I actually, I mean, when I was getting electronics, I had never really heard of them. And then when I finally got to some conferences, they were like, they had a bunch of chumbies on their display and like, yeah, we got all this stuff. So what's the story with that?

Bunny: So, uh, Marvell came along, actually they've, they've, they found us, I think. Um, they're, you know, they were looking for someone to work with in that space. They had, they had, they were just getting their sort of smart photo frame media tablet processor out there. And, and, uh, we were looking for an outstanding CPU with, you know, really good cost performance. And, um, you know, one of their, you know, one of their sales guys came down and had a conversation. The price was right. Um, features look good and started, we started using it. Um, it was a business decision, right? Um, okay. And I think, I think that's very, it was very Marvell sort of Marvell, Marvell, I think is very, they're not sort of an open market provider. They go for verticals. You know, they sort of say, we're going to get that guy and we're going to like sick someone on him until he, you know, we, we make that sale.

Dave Jones: He cracks him. Right.

Chris Gammell: This guy's the bunny salesman. Is that what it was? Well. You take him out to dinner until he buys one.

Dave Jones: Get him dry. Yeah. Take him to a bar.

Bunny: I'm easier than that. Just, just offer me the best price and I'll use it. Right. Yeah. That'll do it. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. You can be bought. Right.

Bunny: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: So was there any like NDA or anything like that? Because it seems like.

Bunny: Of course. I mean, Marvell is very big on the NDAs and, and that, you know, that is, that is sort of a sticking point when you, when you're trying to do open source stuff. Right.

Dave Jones: It's almost to the point of being evil. A lot of engineers I know will not touch a device if you have to sign the NDA to get the data sheet. They just, it doesn't care how cheap it is, how good it is. They'll just say, no, I don't want to deal with those bastards because they won't give me a freaking data sheet.

Bunny: No, it's true. It's, it, it is a, that is a, um, it's definitely very painful to have to deal with NDAs. I think, I think, you know, I'm more, I'm a little more on the real politics side of things. Like it, depending on the, like for Chumbie as a consumer business model, right? I have a, I have a, I have a directive and, and, you know, to build the cheapest thing out there for, for the best price. And so, uh, you know, the consumer ultimately didn't care that like 99% of consumers don't care that they can give the data sheet. Right. There's like 1% who does. Yeah. As far as a hacker board, right. Yeah. But they.

Dave Jones: So, so, so you have to swallow your pride and deal with them.

Bunny: You just have to do it. Right. Right. And so, and so, you know, so we, we did it, right. That's a business decision that we had to make. And, you know, it's, I think there's any, any shame in admitting that, you know, most consumers don't care about it. And you're, you know, if $5 more for a free part versus $5 for NDA part, they, you know, the guy is, it's five bucks and just not going to give it to you. Right. Right. For that, for the openness that they don't really benefit from. So, so, you know, there's definitely parts I use that require NDAs and so forth. And, and, and the other thing is like, there's just parts where it's, you know, eventually they will become non-NDA, you know. So, um, eventually just, it takes time. So, I, I sign in all kinds of NDAs to get early access because if I wait until it's on free and full market, then I'm, I've lost my competitive edge. Right.

Chris Gammell: Yep.

Bunny: So, I'll sign an NDA to get early access, you know, preliminary data sheets and so forth. And I keep them quiet. And then when they're on the open market.

Chris Gammell: The same reason people use parts that are maybe not proven, right. I mean, there's always chances for bugs or errata and stuff, but you take that risk. Yeah. I mean, I get it from a practical standpoint.

Bunny: Yeah. So, it's all, it's all, it's all part of the business landscape and, um, you know, it's true. It's, it, it definitely does make the support for the product more difficult because they don't make the data sheet just out there. And I really wish they would. And I've had conversations with them about doing it and they have people inside Marvell who understand this and they have, you know, really big open source proponents and, and, and, and, and they understand it, but there's a lot of competing business logic, you know, behind it, um, you know, about why they want to do it. And you can agree or disagree with it. They're the guys who, you know, are building the Silicon. So, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Do you see, do you see it getting worse or better? I mean, obviously I don't, I personally think it's getting worse, but do you see it ramping up even more? Have you been signing, signing more NDAs past couple of weeks?

Bunny: No, no, no. I mean, I mean, I think now that sort of, I'm, I'm, I'm, uh, designing for a different market, you know, I'm looking forward to, to some new chips looking at, and I'm, I'm actually really, I love the Marvell guys, but I'm also a really big fan of Freescale as well. Um, and you know, Freescale has, that's great. You can just go to the website and download the data sheet for the chips and so forth. Uh, they're, they're, they're a lot more easy to work with from that front. And so I'm, you know, I'm trying, I'm making a conscious decision to steer myself more towards those just because I do like that, that freedom and ease of low friction. Um, and you know, Freescale can actually buy in DigiKey, whereas Marvell you can't, right? So it's, you know, there's a lot of, you know, but the market I'm going towards now, if I'm more towards developers and hobbyists, they really actually would pay more for a device where they didn't have to get an NDA. And so I, you know, I, I'm sort of realigning my, you know, my, my design choices with the market that I'm really going after, which would be more developers at this point in time, as opposed to, um, you know, consumers.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. And I see on the hacker board that you actually did, you did switch over to a Freescale IMX 233 or something like that.

Bunny: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's a great part. Yeah. That's cool. Um, and actually that, that one, to be honest, was, was, was a cost decision itself. I mean, that was just 233. Yeah, it was luck. It was, um, but I had a, in the process of using the Freescale parts, I had a great experience with their apps engineers and their sales guys and, and, um, and sort of the, you know, the ease of information flow was great. Um, and so that, and so that, that, that, that's actually a big plus to me in this, this particular market.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. And it's good. I mean, hopefully other vendors take notice of that kind of thing, you know, if any of them are listening, we, we, we, we always talk about that too. Of course they are. Yeah. We like that. So. Yeah. Yeah.

Bunny: No, it's, it's a, it's a, you know, it's a cost thing, right? I mean, ultimately I think Freescale probably spends more on apps engineers and support costs because their parts are just downloaded by more individuals. Right. So they, so they, but they, you know, I think Freescale's parts are a little more expensive partially because that's, that is kind of a built-in cost, you know, what part of the cost of business. I think the Marvel parts really are very cost competitive, but, you know, because they're very selective about releasing, you know, who they're going to talk to or not, they, you know, they can make their apps engineering support a lot thinner.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Bunny: And staff is really expensive, you know, you know, if you, if you've got an apps engineer is being paid, I don't know, what do you pay them these days? And Bayer, Bayer is probably six figures close to it, right?

Chris Gammell: Oh, more than that probably, yeah.

Bunny: Yeah. I mean, and think about if you, you know, you think about the volume of chips you're selling and how much going to, you know, have to amortize that guy's cost. It, you know, it, it gets expensive, I think, after a while to sort of put all that staff on it. And so I can totally see the other end of the, of the spectrum. Right. And, and I, you know, I, I, I also got really good support from Marvel as well, and they were really good guys, but, you know, it's because they, they start, they kind of picked me, right, and one made me a priority. And that was great. You know, I was lucky that they, that they felt that way, but, you know, not everyone gets that sort of access and that, and, and so they don't have as many opportunities, but then, you know, they develop that market more thoroughly.

Dave Jones: So, all right. One last question.

Chris Gammell: Yep.

Dave Jones: How did you get the name Bunny?

Chris Gammell: Good question.

Bunny: Yeah. Um, so it was, uh, in middle school, uh, Monty Python, the Holy Grail is sort of just kind of come out at the time.

Chris Gammell: I already love where this is going.

Bunny: And, and there's that, uh, the rabbit with sharp ones. You bit someone's head off?

Chris Gammell: Oh my God.

Bunny: That's a Vorpal Bunny, right? And, uh, and, uh, and one of my friends gave me the nickname Vorpal Bunny because we were playing this, like, like, you know, hack text-based game called Moria, Dungeons of Moria in the day, and there's a Vorpal Bunny kept on nuking me in the, in the dungeon. And, uh, and, and, and I kind of like, kind of like the name. So, so for a while I was going by the, by the handle Vorpal Bunny. And, uh, when I went to school, when I went to MIT, they didn't have enough characters for Vorpal Bunny. So I had to pick Vorpal or Bunny. And I was like, ah, Vorpal, who knows what Vorpal is Bunny? It sounds, eh, it's, it's cuter, but you know, who's ever going to call me Bunny, right? So it's just, it's, it's just an email thing, right? You know, no one used IM. It was on Skype back in the days. This is like weird, you have to go through this as part of the registration process. Okay, Bunny, B-U-N-N-I-E. I'll make it the effeminate form too, right? Just because it's, it's just so out there. And, uh, and then, and then, you know, instant messaging came along. People just, instant messaging comes along and people only see you by your IM name. So people start calling me Bunny through there. And, uh, it really stuck when I had a professor who was, who was, who was, I was a TA for, uh, one of the core courses at MIT. And, and he couldn't remember my real name. And he introduced me as Bunny to a class of like 300 sophomores.

Chris Gammell: Oh, no.

Bunny: And at that point, I was like, you know what? And they're in set the wrong. They remember that. Yep. They remember that, right? They wouldn't forget it. And I was like, you know what? I give up. From now on, I am called Bunny, right? So there's this, there's actually very clear markation. You can tell when, how, how long a person's known me based upon which name they call me by. Yep. Right. So. Oh man, that's great.

Dave Jones: Well, thank you very much, Andrew. We feel like we've known you a long time. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, exactly.

Dave Jones: The show's gone on for an hour and 22 minutes.

Chris Gammell: It's an unusual name to be called by. Yeah, but. Well, it could be worse. All right. Well, thanks so much for being on the show. Thank you very much for joining us. It's been awesome.

Bunny: It was fun. Thanks for having me.

Chris Gammell: Once again, our guest was Andrew Bunny Huang. And you can find him on Twitter at Bunny Studios or on the web at BunnyStudios.com. You can find the Amp Hour on Google+, Twitter, and Facebook. Hoping to see you next week. All right. See ya. See ya.

Chris Gammell: See ya.

Speaker ?: See ya. See ya. See ya. See ya. See ya. See ya. See ya. See ya. See ya.

Dave Jones: And no audio dropouts or anything. That was... Well, Singapore, right?

Bunny: I have 100 megabit to my home, so it's great. Yeah? Oh, man. Oh, wow. That's crazy. That's all the details I left about why I'm here. That's enough reason. 100 megabit to the home. x x x