Last September I wanted to go to a conference in Sweden and my boss asked me what I would do different from my attendance at the US edition of the event the prior April.
I said, “I’m gonna make a bioreactor demo.”
I wrote about the demo here on our corporate blog. In short, to me a bioreactor is no big deal; it’s just a flask with bugs and media. But for others, there’s a real nerd factor, especially with sensors stuffed into the flask, cables streaming data, and the network connectivity I was demonstrating.
Yes, the pic up to the right is the demo I built.
And then something clicked
Before I get to what clicked, I wanted to mention a bit about the demo, the times, and what it all means.
I had chosen to build the demo around an old Arduino Duemilanove I had lying around. I had bought it ten years ago for my son and I to work on and learn. He and I tried to make sense of it all back then, but I really couldn’t find the info and code to help us make the most of it.
Fast forward to 2019 and I was able to find sensors, libraries, example code, and hardware to whip up my demo in a few weeks of nights and weekends type effort. To me, it was a huge difference from ten years before.
And from the ten years before that.
Once upon a time…
I always envied how some folks could build and program hardware. When I was working at MIT, I’d meet hardware folks (can you say Media Lab?) or walk through the halls seeing all the hardware being hacked (that’s where I fell in love with microcontrollers, wanting to build smart robots). In grad school, my advisor was always programming or getting interesting hardware built for the lab. At Nokia, I met hardware folks at Nokia and outside Nokia, who could not only program hardware, but were building really cool gizmos in clever ways. Indeed, it was because of those folks during my time at Nokia, that I learned about the intersection of hardware, software, and design; of Patchube (then Xively, then Google IoT); Arduino; Raspberry Pi; and hardware hacking (yes, I know some of that stuff is from after my time at Nokia, but the early threads were all there).
Alas, while I had deep experience in designing proteins and organisms (ho-hum to me but perhaps magic to you), I had no clue how to string up an LED with the right resistor and getting something to make it blink (ho-hum to you, but perhaps magic to me).
Sigh.
Back to today
Building the demo took me back to those times. And the tools and information I now had access to gave me superpowers to build something I never thought I’d ever be able to.
But after I built the demo, I sort of stepped back and let things cool.
Sort of.
I had picked up a Raspberry Pi Zero at the Sweden event and started playing with that, learning Linux, Kali hacking, and Python.
And then I started digging into the hardware hacking world, wondering how far that rabbit hole went.
That’s when things just clicked.
A new vice
By October, less than two months from when I first started working on the demo, I was hooked, daily reading hardware hacking sites like Hackaday and Hackster.io; perusing community hardware sites like Crowdsupply, Thingiverse, and Tindie; visiting hardware catalogs and building wish lists (yes, Adafruit, that’s me visiting your site every-frakkin-day); and learning about microcontrollers, resistors, capacitors, PCBs, Discord, Raspberry Pi, systems on a chip and single board computers, retro-gaming, Python, Micro Python, CircuitPython, GPIOs, FPGAs, IC2 and SPI, and so much more. And I’ve met and read stuff and watched videos galore of folks who make and break hardware (helpful to work for a hardware company, too, we have so many smarties).
Then I had a new project idea and bought a few items to make it real: a brand new microcontroller, some sensor boards, a soldering iron. I got it working in no time (thanks to readily available libraries and coding guides). I even made my first PCB for it (just holes and traces to connect things together, no components yet, so far). And, yes, I’ve already broken a few things, humorously so.
OMG, so fun. And woe to anyone who gets me taking about it all. Haha.
Watch that wallet
Along with the amazing community resources of examples, libraries, tools, and guides, the hardware has become so cheap (giving you permission to break things*). You can get a wifi- and BT-capable microcontroller with a ton of memory (for a microcontroller) that can run on and charge a battery and is an inch long for $20. Complex, ready-to-use sensors can be $5 or $15. PCBs can be designed with free tools and ordered online for a few bucks. And just about everything is on Amazon (tho, I prefer to buy from the manufacturer directly, to support them).
But beware: I work hard to keep myself to buying multiple items at a time (to save on shipping). And I work hard to keep from buying everything in sight. It all adds up. And fast. Haha.
What’s next?
I’m surprised by where I have come in three months – the confidence, the knowledge, the skills. And I’ve only scratched the surface. Though it’s clear to me that _at this moment_ this has become a daily obsession that is occupying so much of my spare time, and there’s no sign of it slowing down.
In my innovation work, I tend to do a chocolate and peanut butter ideation exercise. So I wonder if the hardware hacking were the chocolate, what would be the peanut butter I can mix it with? Though, I don’t mean something like hardware and brewing, which is what I am working on with one of my projects. I mean something bigger, something I might mix with hardware to do something completely different, that might catapult me to a new phase in my life.
What might that be?
Dunno.
For now, I’m quite excited running up this hardware hacking learning curve.
Where might it lead me?
*My wife says, in skiing, “If you’re not falling down, you’re not trying hard enough.” Sort of works for life, in general, too.
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