mergeconflict274
===

[00:00:00] James: Frank, I need to build something and you're the only person that I know that can help me build it. Do you know what. 

[00:00:18] Frank: Oh, boy, I am so gonna fail at this. I built you something like six months ago or a year ago, or I don't, maybe it was 10 years ago and I still haven't even sent it to you. So, uh, I'm a little nervous.

I can't even guess at what you need 

[00:00:32] James: now. You know, my application, my cadence shameless plug for my application, my cadence, 

[00:00:37] Frank: uh, which Apple's. 

[00:00:39] James: Uh, it's an application that you connect a little Bluetooth sensor, you know, and it reads your RPM called cadence and it displays a number. It's a, it's an app that shows a number on the screen.

[00:00:48] Frank: Frank terribly useful. I can't wait to purchase it multiple times and get the pro deluxe it's pack. Plus 

[00:00:55] James: that is great. Plus deluxe, super turbo edition. Now, Frank, I test this app in the worst way possible now. Go back nine months to when I first started development of this app, I was had my spin bike, my sunny bike, which I'll put a link to the, to my blog.

I built it this little spin bike for four, 400 bucks. Now this little cadence sensor, and I literally went into the garage and I slapped the Bluetooth sensor on the bike. Started paddling, had my laptop balanced on the handlebars with an iPhone plugged in. Debugging it so I can add break points. That is literally Frank, how I developed this applicant.

[00:01:42] Frank: I'd love it. I love it. I mean, if there isn't some kind of physical risk to physical injury or bodily harm while you're doing development or you're really doing development, James, I think this is like, yeah. Hard level, game level. I love it. I really wish you had taken some pictures or you were doing some YouTube streaming.

Cause I would've loved to have seen you like clickety clack cutting away on the keyboard while you were bouncing on that. 

[00:02:06] James: Now I may or may not have dropped my laptop or phone several dozen times, but they all survived Frank. Now, since then I've progressed. I've I've, I've, I've learned. And uh, now what I do, because since the app just basically works is not I'm in testing mode.

Right. I make a bunch of changes. I know I'm not going to break that logic, that that actually is doing the, you know, connection and parsing the stuff. So if I'm making UI changes, all I do now is I, as I take the sensor in my hand, And I just go in a circle motion, I'm still doing a physical exercise. I'm just like, oh my God, the numbers are not consistent all over the place.

Right. Cause that's, that's not correct in my arm. Can't do that. 

[00:02:49] Frank: Um, but from my God, oh my God, I'm so excited for what you're about to ask me. I'm sorry, I'm getting ahead, James. What do you need? James? 

[00:02:57] James: Frank is really annoying to, to, to, to, to, to, to be at my desk and then do this thing, which gives me very inaccurate numbers.

And then to actually have to still go outside, install my application and I do a spin class, actually test it. I was thinking this afternoon, man. Wouldn't it be great if I just had. A little tiny robot that I could slap a sensor on and I could set the RPMs and it just went in circles and it basically did the thing that my arm is doing.

But I'm an idiot for nine months of doing this. 

[00:03:33] Frank: I absolutely love this idea. I. In fact, I can build you something very dangerous and very clunky. It's going to work great for a few months and then it's going to break a window and I am so excited to make all this happen. I, I have it all planned out in my head.

It's going to be called the Armstrong 3000. Um, uh, what else? What else? What else? Um, this is so exciting. It's funny. Um, You know, in hardware, when I first started working at general motors, there was always, you always built hardware twice. You built the real hardware that was going to go into the car and interfaced with the car and you know, that all those Curry kind of things.

And then you built what was called the bench version, the test version. And. All of the same fundamental electronics and everything, except you build something that's actually testable and you're for us that was usually like fake, uh, blower, motor doors and fan controls and, you know, knobs. I love the knobs.

You gotta have giant knobs on your test devices. But you would build that because it's just not convenient slash dangerous to be testing your, all your software changes on actual running hardware with big machinery behind it, much safer to do it in the lab. So you're actually following a pretty classic, uh, engineering, um, pattern.

Yeah. Let's go with the pattern architecture here. 

[00:05:02] James: Yeah. I. I was thinking in my mind that yes, I can not be the only person. And you've now validated it. That needs to spin things. I'm 

[00:05:13] Frank: ready, but I'm so excited for Armstrong. 

[00:05:16] James: I'm trying. Now I was thinking that it would be a little bit less of an army, more of, more of a, as a, of a, of a crank crank Tron, because we don't crank arm.

Right. So now here's the cool thing about these sensors, Frank, is that they don't need to be vertical or. Parallel with the ground, right. They don't need to be vertical a T with the ground. Right. I was thinking it'd be like more of a helicopter. So here's what I'm thinking. And tell me, I've never done IOT, obviously, besides my non IOT stuff.

Cause I asked you to do stuff. Here's what I'm thinking. I'm going to need a finger, but Juby, I'm going to need to put some code on the thing of a job and then what I'm going to need it. I'm going to need like a rotor thing that goes in circles and then. I'm going to need a Popsicle stick and I'm going to then need to glue that Popsicle stick on the twirly thing.

And then I'm going to need to rubber band the sensor on to the Popsicle stick, and then we've done it. Is that about. 

[00:06:15] Frank: I hate to say this, but that would probably work for a little while. I mean, you should add some sparkles just to make sure luck is on your side, but yeah, that sounds vaguely about, you know, it's not so different from what you would actually build.

Something very similar to this. I wasn't using one of the off the shelf sensors, but they make very cheap. I am use inertial measurement, unit thinkers. I forgot what that was in your lingo, but they contain an accelerometer and a gyro and they are really cheap. They're kind of wonderfully cheap and you can buy like a pack of five or six of them for 10 bucks.

And you just. So I wanted to make sure that the physics and my head was correct her for these devices because you know, things can be weird. Physics is hard. And so I actually built something very similar to this. I 3d printed. Uh, kind of a disc think of a desk, uh, right in the center of it. I put a battery that seemed like a really safe place to put a battery.

The problem with spinning things is if you have wires, the wires have to spin also. And it's really easy to create knots and get things tangled up and all of that. So the hardest part of spinning things is separating the spinning and the non spinning parts. Wow. So technical, the rotor and the stator, sir, we got to separate the rotor and the stator.

So what I did was actually put the battery and the electronics on the rotor, the spinning part. And that way I didn't have to have any wires coming down to the stationary part. There are more, uh, uh, expensive and fancy things involving lollipop, sticks and glitter that actually. Golly, what are their names?

I don't know. They, they, they take care of that connection problem for you using, um, uh, Cosentryx sewn cylinders that make electrical contact, you know, all sorts of tricks for this kind of stuff, but you have a pretty classic problem there and it's. Pretty solvable. I do love that those sensors can be reoriented.

And that makes sense. Just going back to that, um, IMU that I was talking about, they can be in any orientation because they're three-dimensional. So what I'm assuming the software just looks at whichever access is rotating the most, and it just assumes that that's your crank crank. Is that the word 

[00:08:44] James: crank, crank arm.

Now the beautiful part too, at the same time. It could be a helicopter thing, or I could just like super glue it to the wall, right? Like the, the board to the wall. And then it would, it would also work the same, because if it, if it, if the, if the board is the base, you could also then attach it and make it, you know, vertical or whatever.

So what do I need, what do I need for this thing? Frank do, um, I, I have a, I have a meadow board that I, uh, I got and I kick-started, and then I don't have a soldering iron. So that seems like that's going to be a problem. So, so walk me through, what are the parts to build this spinny thing? It's, doesn't seem like it's a lot, but if I was doing it low key, super budget, like, Hey, I got, I got $5 and 25 cents in my pocket.

And then let's say, Hey, I got, I got a 3d printer. I got $4. I got, you know, $18 in my pocket. Like what, what, what type of things do I need to build this spinny thing? 

[00:09:43] Frank: Okay, so you will need a motor James, uh, just to give your arm a break, I guess. And so that you don't have to have a proper crank or something like that.

We could probably come up with something with rubber bands and like, you know, store some energy in the rubber bands and let them unwind. But let's throw that idea aside for the moment and buy ourselves a motor. Uh, the trick here is. All sorts of electrical motors out there. They're the common ones in America are three phase inductor motors.

Those are your basic fan that you plug into the wall. They just kinda take the power from the wall and just shove it into a motor and then it starts spinning. Those are great. Um, the problem is they only spin at 60 Hertz unless you have a gearbox or something, because that's how the power and the wall spins.

So that is your motor. You're going to throw that away. That's not going to work for you, throw it out. Uh, there's another kind of motor called a DC motor. These are the motors we grew up with as kids. They are in pretty much every toy we ever had as kids that, uh, spawn something, your classic DC motor, everyone loves them because they're really easy to use.

You can just shove some DC power. Two ports and the thing spins. 

[00:11:00] James: So that's like an RC. 

[00:11:02] Frank: Yeah. Okay. See cars, uh, not modern RC cars though. We'll we'll get to modern. I was very careful to say our childhoods, not current childhoods. Yeah. Because technology has improved. The problem with those DC motors is they often had these like copper brushes on them.

Do you remember the copper brushes as a kid? They would spark sometimes even look into the motor. I don't know parents and sparks parents don't like sparks. So brush, uh, brushed motors are going a little bit out of fashion these days, but they're super cheap. Okay. Another kind of motor of far more interesting kind of motor is a permanent magnet, DC motor.

I really hate those, that name for it. Uh, in school, we called it a synchronous machine, a three-phase synchronous machine. It's a much worse name now that I think about it. Anyway, it is. Uh, another three phase motor. So it's complicated. It's a complicated motor, but the neat thing about it is it has magnets in it and who doesn't love magnets, James 

[00:12:08] James: mag.

I love that they're 

[00:12:10] Frank: the future and the present turns out. So these motors are awesome. They have, uh, created the revolution that we're seeing right now with drones and electric skateboards and hover boards and the. Bikes. Those are all these, um, I'm sorry, I'm getting all lost the names because I absolutely hate calling them brushless DC motors.

That's what, that's what the internet calls them. That's what I'm going to call them on this podcast. Uh, so those are motors, but that's only one part of your problem. That's getting something to spin. So out of that selection, James, which one sounds the most wonderful to you? 

[00:12:48] James: Um, that's a good question.

Well, so it's going to be based on my needs. So my needs, Frank, are I need this Spinney thing. It doesn't have to go that fast. That's the thing is I think that it would be fine if it went from zero to 50. Rotations per minute. I mean, when you're spinning, you do go up to like 120 ish or so, but ideally to test it, I don't need it to go that fast.

I just need, I could go MVP, minimal viable product. It needs to go 20 rotations per minute. 

[00:13:30] Frank: Okay. But 20 RPM, but I 

[00:13:32] James: kind of want it to go fast. You know what I mean? Like I kind of want it to be a little realistic. Let's say let's say 50 as a minimum. 

[00:13:44] Frank: Okay. Okay. I have good news for you today. Uh, fast as easy.

Okay. Motors love to go fast, but not too fast. Not too fast, actually. It's slowing them down. That's hard. They really want to spin. In fact, like, uh, if you were just to go on Amazon and go buy, like the cheapest PLDC brushless DC motor out there for like a drone, it would be 15 bucks and it's going to spin it like 15,000 RPM.

Yeah, it might be a little much for crank Tron 3000. So in addition to a motor and it kind of doesn't matter if you get a, a DC motor or one of these brushless DC motors, you need to get what's called a speed controller. So this is where control engineering falls in, because you said very explicitly, you want like a little dial or something, so you can dial in exactly what speed to rotate.

[00:14:41] James: Yeah. Cause, cause, cause I think that that's one thing. I was thinking about it today is I need to make sure that it's not only, like I would see it go up and go down. Right. Obviously when I turn that on and off, but it would be nice just to have a little bit of control over that. If, if let's say I needed to test some logic where it's like, maybe I did need to go to 200 and see what happened, you know, see what my app does or, or, or ideally.

One thing that'd be really cool is inside my application. I do charts and graphs, and that literally is the RPM up and down over time. So even being able to co-sign it and say, Hey, do a, you know, 25 up to 75 and down to 25, like that would be pretty cool to map. 

[00:15:21] Frank: I love the idea, the hardware unit tests that actually spins up a nice, dangerous device, glued to the wall with glitter.

This is going to be so fun. So, uh, the, the trick now is this, uh, problem of measuring. And pretty much for every application, you need to measure the speed of the motor because the motors doesn't really want to tell you how fast it's going. It's kind of a dumb device. You feed a power and it goes faster.

That's kind of the case for both DC and brushless, DC motors, give them more power. They go faster. So your trick is to increase and decrease that power to match the exact RPMs that you want. And in order to do that, you got to measure the RPMs. Now in your case, what's super cool is you haven't had. And a sensor to do that.

Yeah. So in your case, it's a little tricky, not tricky, but, uh, you have the option of, you could just use that sensor itself or, uh, do something even more, even more clever and buy a high quality. Speed controller. And this is something I've actually been getting into. I like building those balanced spots, you know, bounce, bounce, bounce bot.

So I'm working on balanced bot mark four, and it's 40 pounds and five feet tall, which means it needs some power. It needs some energy going through it. And. The previous versions of the balanced bots. I never bothered to measure the speed of the motors because it turns out you can kind of balance without measuring that speed.

So I never put one of your RPM things on. I never put an IMU thing on, I never paid for an expensive speed controller because I just didn't care. But with this new version of bounce bar, I do care. I want to know how fast those wheels are spinning. And so I found myself in a dilemma of, oh boy, I got to buy a speed controller.

And let me tell you, the world is not a fair. There are two kinds of speed controllers out there. There are the industrial ones used by professionals with very expensive hardware, big plugs, big cables, big switches. They're kind of cool, actually, really cool, but they're very, very expensive. Uh, these are.

And there they're not always called speed controllers. Sometimes they're called a driver, just a controller that can have all sorts of different functions. If you have, what's called a servo motor, instead of controlling the speed, you're controlling the position of the motor, but it's really just that difference.

Are you, you know, are you saying I want it to go this fast or you saying I want it to go here or there that's the only difference between a servo and a normal motor. It has this built-in. So I was, uh, working on my little robot and I ran into a really nice project. It's called a V E S C a, the V is for Vetter and I'll make sure we get a link into the show notes here.

And I'm super excited by it because it's open source software. It's actually kind of old it's from 2015, 2016. And I came out with the, um, kind of electronic scale. Craze and the electronic bike craze, because no one wanted to spend $2,000 for an industrial controller. Uh, they wanted to spend much less and ideally get some open source hardware out there.

So although you can go onto Amazon and buy some like e-bike controllers, and I even tried this, I even tried this, I tried to be cheap for like $20. They just didn't work for my application. And so I, uh, looked into these V. As CS. I hope I'm saying that correctly. And I've been super excited because it's open source hardware with source software.

You spend a lot of money, but you can change a billion parameters. And I love it. Okay. 

[00:19:16] James: I mean, before we continue on this IOT spinny thing, the thing here, can you describe, because you're a hardware guy, the difference between like why the open source hardware, part of that is important? Like, what does that mean, actually?

[00:19:32] Frank: Oh, what does it mean? So in the case of electronics, it usually means a circuit diagram, plus because we live in a microprocessor based world, some software, the firmware. So yeah, like a bunch of CAD files and some C, C code usually poorly documented, poorly written. Bombs dropped. So that's usually what you mean by open source hardware.

And you'll see, um, a lot of companies doing this bark fun is a little kind of hobbyist robotics kind of company. And they release all their hardware as, uh, open hardware where all the diagrams are in get hub and all the source code that you need to access that hardware R and get hub 

[00:20:19] James: that make that make sense.

So if you actually wanted to go in and change a bunch of stuff, you. 

[00:20:25] Frank: You absolutely can. The best part is if you ever want to modify it or maybe merge it into a bigger board or something like that, you know, for your project, you only have $16 in some glitter. So we're probably not going to create custom boards or anything, but once you have.

A project that you want to do, you know, 10 of 20 of a hundred of who knows you usually want to build a custom board or something like that. So instead of starting from scratch and building all your own design, you can copy and paste you just open up, um, a few reference boards, copy that, paste it into your project, open it.

Another reference board. Copy it. Paste it into your project. I wish it were exactly. Uh, simple of course, electronic software's terrible. And that copy and paste operation may not work, but the idea is there in the same way that open source software has at that, you have a bunch of people's eyes on it. And there are always contributing back improvements.

So with all these kinds of projects, you'll always see like a version one version two, version three. And that's almost always because someone was looking at the circuit diagram and thought, oh, you know, there's a better way to do this and you should do it this way. And then it gets improved over time. So I wouldn't say necessarily, you're going to change in the hardware.

You're going to change the hardware, but the community, the world is changing the hardware. And if you spot a mistake, then you can post. 

[00:21:51] James: That makes sense. Just like you have open source software, open source, operating systems, people turn into a new thing. Like, you know, Linux has evolved and there's many flavors of Lennox, right.

And there's also Android. Right. And there's all sorts of things that have built on top of that equals. 

[00:22:06] Frank: Yeah, exactly, exactly. Plus, uh, you do have some software involved, uh, and so this was super exciting. Now the potential is you have all these CAD files, you could send them off to be manufactured and mailed in.

And in fact, I was considering doing that because, you know, What the heck, you know, I'm fun. I like soldering, but I was watching a YouTube where someone actually did that and the amount of parts that they had, the solder and they're much better solders than I am myself. And they had such a hard time and out of the two boards they made, neither of them worked and it turned out building it yourself only saved you about $20 off the price of just ordering it from Amazon with prime.

So guess which one? 

[00:22:55] James: You, I assume that you Saturday. 

[00:22:58] Frank: No, I wish I wish I was that ambitious. No, I'm not lazy old, man. I ordered it. Anyway, these things are a bit out of your price league. They're like a hundred bucks, but for what they do, I know, I know it sounds like a lot, but I swear to you like those industrial controllers, which they're really replacing are in the thousands of dollars.

Got it. So, yeah, it's not. It is bad. It's why robots are expensive. It's why electronic skateboards are expensive. You know, um, these things have not come all the way down in price, but if you're a small shop, you can take advantage of these open source designs and do it. For you, James, I think we're just going to have to bargain bin shop.

Uh, we now the nice thing about these, um, speed controllers is that they obviously have to measure the speed, just like you have to do for your application. They're doing it kind of for wholly different reasons, but there, but there's a few ways you can do it. Um, the most kind of famous way that everyone does is magnet.

Magnets more magnets James, a hall effect sensors. You put a few coils around, um, w whatever you put a bunch of coils around your motor, put a bunch of wires connected to them, and you measure, uh, the inductance through those. And that will tell you how strong the magnetic field is through it. That effect is called the hall effect.

And from that, you can figure out how fast the motor is spinning. If all that sounded really complicated it's because it is. That's why we need open-source hardware so that, uh, people solve these problems. You actually can do it. I remember as a part of, um, my studies as electrical engineering, we had to do it ourselves and it was terrible and it barely worked, but it's totally, it is doable if you spend enough time.

And you're very careful. So although that is a neat way to do it, I still don't think it's going to fit within your $16 budget, but I haven't. I have another. 

[00:24:59] James: Okay, I'm ready. I'm ready for your cheap way. Hit me. 

[00:25:02] Frank: That's why it's so much more fun. Anyway, you, um, you use an infrared light and you cut a bunch of holes in the, uh, thing that you're spinning around the spinny part, and you keep the, uh, a little, a little light emitting, diode and led.

Shines a light and there's another little, uh, little diode that receives that light and it's called a photo diode. And if it's bright, it's like an on-off switch. It detects that something is bright or dark and you just watch those pulses bright, dark, bright, dark come through. You do a little bit of math based on how big the hole is, and you can figure out exactly how fast that object is spinning.

And in fact, if you go by like a kid's robotics kit or something like that, almost definitely there's one of these kinds of, uh, infrared and coders built into it somewhere. Now. What's 

[00:26:00] James: cool about that is I just watch. A video on, I've watched a lot of like video game, like vintage video game stuff. And there was a Nintendo NES on NES controller called the U force and it was motion controlled.

And do you know how they detected the force that you moved your hand in and out? 

[00:26:20] Frank: An accelerometer and I am you? 

[00:26:22] James: Nope, I are sensors. So what they did is they had an IRR blaster and receiver, right. And then what they would do is they could measure how high or low your hand was based on the IRR. That'd be bounced back and receiver that a whole bunch of issues, of course, with it.

Cause the IRR things were too close and light and light leakage and all this other stuff. But funny enough that you literally talk about that. Th how cool would that to be? Is you, you, you modify the speed that it goes by moving your hand up and down at a certain range and it figures out how fast you want to spend this thing.

[00:26:55] Frank: Oh yeah. Those are cool little sensors. I've used those before and. Little projects. Yeah. Uh, they're great. Until what, like a mirror or something. Those don't work very well on them, but they're neat. I'm sorry. I'm just lost. Trying to remember their product number. I think I used to get them from Phillips.

They were like $15. I loved them so much. I built a little robot that followed you down the hall, using them back in college days. Well, let 

[00:27:22] James: me ask you a question frame, because I think I might not have to spend any money 

[00:27:26] Frank: because. How can you possibly build crank Tron now? 

[00:27:33] James: I mean, maybe I to buy popsicles. I remember at the beginning of podcasts, when I said I started the wilderness labs and meadow board and the full hat kit pro, and I didn't ever do anything with it.

Now, is there stuff in there Frank, that I could use, you've talked about all these motors, these sensors, all these things. Are there things in this thing that would let me do the. 

[00:27:56] Frank: Yes, there are. So I don't remember the full pack, but, uh, there's definitely a motor in there and you can definitely, uh, glue your lollipop, stick to the motor.

And that can be part of the crank. You're going to need something a little more sturdy than that though, because how big are these sensors? Are they 

[00:28:15] James: heavy at all? Uh, no. They're a few ounces. They're really light. 

[00:28:19] Frank: Yeah. Okay. So yeah. So you'll have a motor from there. You'll have your lollipop stick, uh, connected to the sensor then from there, it's, it's a little bit tricky.

Uh, if you want to do, I'm pretty sure both of those dials are on. Hmm. So the biggest trick for you would be to build the frame, you know, kind of a thing that holds everything together, because if you're doing that diametric to know how fast something is spinning, then by necessity, those have to stay. Mm.

And the other thing has to spend, so you get into a little bit of, um, craft making. So what you do is you get an Amazon box and you Mount all the sensors into the Amazon box and you have the things spinning inside there. You know, roughly something along those lines. There are even more alternatives though.

You could, um, Glue one of those I am use they're very cheap. They're well, within your budget, you can glue one of those to the lollipop stick, also have that spin around and that has a gyro on it. And that gyro will tell you how fast it's spinning. Isn't that? Yeah, that's 

[00:29:30] James: super cool. Actually. That's really cool.

So it's kind of like, yeah. It'll oh, that's oh, that's neat. So, so yeah, it will actually relay that information for me because it knows how facets. 

[00:29:43] Frank: Yeah, exactly. Honestly, it's probably the same chip as what's in those other sensors. Yeah. Yeah. So what you would have to do is wire up one of those chips to the net.

I almost call it a net. Do we know the weather in it's labs? Um, at seven you'll put a battery onto that spinny part also, and then you'll have to do some like wifi communications or some Bluetooth. Only because you don't want to have wires coming off of the spinning part. We want to keep all this wireless.

Yeah. So you would, you would have to program that stuff, but I bet you, you could program that pretty fast because it's just C-sharp code. I use the HTTP listener. I think, I think that's what wilderness labs uses. And you can put a web server up in C sharp and while it's like five lines of code, I love putting up web servers in C-sharp.

Yeah. 

[00:30:39] James: Yeah, that'd be super 

[00:30:40] Frank: cool. Yeah. Yep. So yeah, you glue all that together with, you're not soldering iron. You're going to need a soldering iron, or I'm going to need a soldering or something like that. And we'll have this, uh, sensor and we'll have your sensor and we'll have a lot of wifi traffic and we'll pray that they're not rotating so fast that it breaks all the wifi.

And I think this can happen. I'm excited for this. Yeah. 

[00:31:03] James: I mean, I I'm excited. I want it to happen. I don't know. I want to build it live. You know, I always am jealous of you and you're soldering stuff and building stuff out on your stream. And I'm like, I could do that. That's a thing I can do. But this whole, you know, thing that I want to build, it seems simple, but I know it's not, I know it can be simple, but not the most simplest thing, but it scares me even if it is simple, you know what I mean?

Cause I don't know what I need to do. And why do I need a soldering? I need to cables need to go in. 

[00:31:33] Frank: Yeah. I mean, it's just so that you can connect things to things otherwise, how would they be connected? So for 

[00:31:40] James: example, in the house, down for the soldering gun, I 

[00:31:43] Frank: doubt it maybe a little, Spotfire had a little patina to things.

Okay. Well, okay. To answer your question, honestly, it's because, uh, the wilderness labs, meadow is one board with a bunch of holes in it. Yep. And when you go to buy this IMU, that MPU 60 50, I think that's the one I use. Uh, that's going to be a little board with a bunch of holes in it. So you got to get the electricity between those holes.

That's, that's what the soldering is. So you get a wire, you put the wire between them and you. Uh, connect the wire to the boards via the solder. It's it's really not bad. I know you've put it off for awhile. I've always been on the show. I've probably tried to convince you to buy a soldering iron 10 times, but maybe this project will do it because I'd love to see you do it on the stream.

I haven't been streaming very much myself lately, so I'm just egging you on it. 

[00:32:38] James: Got it. Yes. I want to do it. It's a thing that I need to do cause I can't keep rotating my hand and arm in the air. Frank, just can't do it. 

[00:32:49] Frank: Can I tell you about one more? Really cool ESC out there. Another open hardware. Well, yeah, I know me.

I know you're probably not going to want to pay for this one either because this one's $150, we're going up in price. But the neat thing here is this is I, you know, I, I'm not sure if I want to. Sorry. So they're an open source hardware, open hardware. There is like a foundation out there with a cute little logo and you put that logo on your hardware, blah, blah, blah.

Whatever, uh, most people just put a license on their stuff. So there is a board out there called O drive and it's from a company called O drive robotics. And I just want to give them a shout out because I never knew about them and they're beautiful little boards. So I was super excited about my from before, but they were from like 2015, 2016.

They've been improved over time, but really they were designed for electronic skateboards and electronic bikes. They can do so much more because they're open source. People have added feature after feature, but they're getting a little curmudgeony and, uh, this new OneDrive thing is really cool because it is two controllers.

So you can control two motors. Look at that. So instead of two, 100 hour controllers, you can have $150 controller and it's still. I'm not sure it's open source hardware in that they're taking improvements from the community, but they are still releasing all their schematics and everything. So you could yourself assemble one and not pay them a dime and build out one of these boards and all the firms.

It is available with an MIT license. I should go back. One thing I don't like about the V E S C is that it's a GPL code and I, you know, me, I hate the GPL. I'm attracted to this O drive thing. Um, just because I prefer it's open source license anyway. So I think, um, for balanced spot, mark five, I'll be using one of those.

Oh, drives. I just, I was so excited by it because it's someone who. Yeah. If when you just go to the website for it, they, they talk about how I, these are things really aren't that complicated, and there's no reason we should be spending so much money, um, for things that don't work the way we want. So these boards are really convenient if you're doing robotics or anything where you're just going to control a motor, because that was things come up.

And I think it's fantastic. And I love this open hardware world that we're living. 

[00:35:23] James: Very cool. I love it. I, you know, you came on when we first started talking about what we were going to talk about today. I didn't, you probably didn't think we were talking about spinning things on, uh, now. Um, and then I know you're a fan of spinning things because of balanced bond.

We've talked about balanced, bought on the podcast before, and, uh, I've recently been, you know, coming up with a lot of brand new robot ideas too. So you spinning off. But if you will, is only the first thing that we will probably end up talking about, or second thing I should say on this podcast. And the cool part about you is that you're very in tune with what's happening in this world.

And I am not. So I appreciate all of your guidance and all of your help, Frank. 

[00:36:06] Frank: Yeah. And I should say I I'm, I try to stay up to day two, but this world is so big. That it's really impossible. But yeah, I, I got into programming because I love doing hardware, so I gotta, I gotta keep doing it James forever and ever.

Hey, did you see the Amazon? Just, we love talking robots, so we have to talk robots for a second. Did you see the Amazon has released a new robot? No 

[00:36:31] James: robots. Are they really. 

[00:36:32] Frank: The Astro, I believe it's called. It's kind of cute. Again, it's an iPad on wheels. Are we talking about that from the, uh, what was it Samsung or Sony did?

Uh, did one of those? I did I get that right? It's a called the Astro Excel. The 

[00:36:48] James: Astro. Yeah, it's a thousand dollars. Oh my God. 

[00:36:51] Frank: It's a thousand dollars invite. Only MSRP is going to be $1,500. So at least, you know, that 200 of that is probably going to the motor controllers. We we've covered that much today.

These things are expensive for that reason. I'm not sure it really does anything, but it's super cute. I'm not going to buy one. I keep telling myself I'm not going to buy one, but it's super cute. Anyway, Amazon has a robot now just had to 

[00:37:17] James: mention it. It's all happening. It is happening. And the funny I'm watching the release video, I'm like, I think they've like put like flames behind it or something.

Oh my goodness. Very cute. Um, about cute robots. It's very, very nice. And you could build one of these things with all the things that we talked about on this podcast today. Pretty much. 

[00:37:36] Frank: Absolutely. Oh, introduce 

[00:37:38] James: itself. Oh my goodness. 

[00:37:40] Frank: It's important. Um, in fact, like all these advanced speed controllers that I'm talking about, do even more than that, like you can plug the IMU, the inertial measurement unit, the gyro right into it, clicked a few check boxes and it'll do balancing by itself.

So there's like, you know, I'm contributing nothing to the space because it's already like built into a lot of these open source pieces of hardware. But then again, Um, I'm building a 40 pound five foot robot and no one else seems to be doing that. So I'm excited for it's window breaking capabilities.

[00:38:17] James: Amazing. Oh my goodness. Well, if you have an idea, For IOT or an improvement on Frank's design for spinning arm bought 5 21 18. Let us know, write us in@merchantconflict.fm. There's a contact button. We'll put all the links into the show notes below, but Frank, thank you so much. I'm going to definitely try to build this live.

It's going to happen. I got to get a soldering iron first. That's the first thing that's going to happen? 

[00:38:42] Frank: The real, the question is, will you design it or will you just go head first? I'm excited for both. 

[00:38:47] James: Good question or do we ask Brian to create a hacker IO project first? And then I, I go on, I implement from there.

We shall see, follow me on this journey and we're calm without a fam. We will update all of you. And of course, if you like this podcast, tell your friends, we appreciate that and leave us a review. You can do that on the podcast that you listen in on right now, if your podcast. Support that, uh, but I was gonna do it for this week's emerge conflict.

So until next time I'm James Montoya Magno. 

[00:39:14] Frank: Okay. And I'm Frank Krueger. Thanks for listening.