Meet the Maker - Simon Monk of MonkMakes

hey robot makers are you an evil genius do you want to meet the person behind this book simon monk then keep watching so we've got a really special guest with us today um i have simon monk uh just waiting in the background so simon has got a degree in cybernetics which i'm really interested to know a bit more about and a phd in software engineering as well so he's been an electronics hobbyist since his early teens and about 2012 divided his work between writing books and designing products for his business that he started with his wife monk makes which manufactures hobby electronic kits and boards so without further ado we'll meet our new guest meet the maker simon monk hi simon how are you doing hi kevin i'm very well thank you nice great to see you thank you for joining me so um yeah this channel is all about robotics and hobbyist electronics and so on so really pleased i think our interests really do align on this so um i'll jump into the first question i've got for you which is uh when did you first get started in electronics and robotics um well electronics um as a school boy really um sort of um early well it's a teenager i used to go to the local library and get out look pour over the issues of practical electronics um and practical wireless and look for so the strip board projects in there that i could make and without really understanding anything about any how any of it works is you know very much follow this recipe you'll need to go and buy these components from your from your local electronic component shop i grew up in wolverhampton and actually we had three electronic component shops um you know quite to yeah all three of them independent actually yeah so i didn't and i think later on there was um a tandy radio shack type turned up uh but uh yeah no that was yeah making things from kit well not even from kits just going to the electronics shop buying the components which were primarily selling spare components for people you know for mending radios and televisions and things like that and then putting them putting them together sometimes they work sometimes they took they didn't work you know they might have worked after a while and some of them didn't work ever but i enjoyed doing it and got used to learn to love the smell of solder fumes which is something that um yeah i think if you if you have worked on electronics you do actually quite enjoy soldering it i don't know if you find that as well absolutely activity isn't it yeah it's sort of satisfying the way you said melting metal with a with a little little instrument that's good yeah and then it sort of solidifies and it's a real join then isn't it and you've committed yeah committed testing yeah yeah i mean i've got a similar kind of uh background myself in the um when i was very little my dad worked in electronics he was a tv repair engineer for radio rentals and uh um rumblers i think before that as well so he had a you know a job with electronics so that he always had like other people's tvs as a sort of you know people always say can you repair this can you repair that there was always stuff in his study and it became kind of like a mad scientist lab you know there's all kinds of oscilloscopes and tv's half you know with the back off and all the sort of scary electronics poking out and that smell of solder as well so uh yeah he used to make little little things for us i remember the one of the first one was like a little traffic light he had like a five five five timer chip and a and it would go sort of red amber green and back again and i found this fascinating because that you know this thing sort of came to life with real lights and things so i remember a project very like that in something like practical wireless i think yes probably a five five five timer and then a 4017 decade counter and then an led and then you can sort of all together some of the outputs from this decade counter yeah to get the right periods for the different leds to make red amber green i i'm sure i remember something like that back in the in practical wireless 1979 or something like that but yeah it was fun making little projects like that yeah so we used to go to those sort of radio affairs radio hum fares um so oh yeah great for second-hand components absolutely yeah all the world war ii sort of um surplus you know supplies and you know yeah you'd have like a lancaster bomber uh radio set or something like that remember trolling through i went to one of those a few years ago actually and i picked up some old um bakelites ammeters yeah i still haven't found it used for them but they're just so nice i just couldn't resist buying them but there's an aesthetic there isn't some point yeah yeah yeah that's it and uh like you mentioned about tandy you know um radio shack but in the uk tandy i think was the name of the uh the owner wasn't it radio shack he was his second name was oh really i didn't know that yeah so there's lots of tandy's in the uk um before they went bust and uh every christmas i'd get the the catalog and i'd be peering through thinking you know what is it i want to have from this kit and they would sometimes have these like 101 or 151 electronics kits with all the components on a piece of cardboard with a little springs that's it little springs yep and you put the wires in and they'd spring back and yeah i think i had a few magic smoke experiments with that where the thing would you know i'd shot something out and it wouldn't work but yeah yeah i seem to remember you'd get through quite a lot of batteries they didn't really explain very well yeah they didn't really explain very well how the thing worked you'd spend so long just putting like wire from a to b and b to c and then hope after like thousands of hours of doing this that the thing would work yeah exactly but yeah it's good good fun that yeah so have you built have you built any robots yourself have you um and if you have what was your first robot um yeah well fairly late on um really coming to building robots it's most of the stuff that i used to make as a because really um very keen on all of this stuff as a teenager and then when i went to university um when i finished university all the jobs that were out there were software so i really spent the next 20 years working in software and then came back to electronics as a hobby um so one of the first sort of projects i made actually when i discovered arduino because i'd looked at microcontrollers before and you could get little boards uh you know development kits for pick and things like that yeah but they weren't at all accessible um they were quite you know there's a big cost of getting into working out how to use them and things and arduino just made that so simple and at the time i was a mac user whilst a llama mac just worked on all platforms it was a really nice simple integrated development environment there was good material on it and um really when i discovered arduino and started playing with it one of my first projects was to actually try and make a a rumba style um back you know vacuum cleaning robot um my approach to it was a bit crude in that i got a couple of um really cheap uh electric screwdrivers from um cpc actually and they they make quite good gear motors you know quite high current but incredible torque because because they're a screwdriver so that's what they do but and then i got a little sort of car vac that had in the garage that kind of strapped to the top of it at an angle and then you know made this the control electronics made it some little h bridges to drive the motors and things and yeah so that's probably the only sort of robot i've really properly made for myself as it were yeah we've got we had at one point we went we had a few products that were robot related so we had a um we sold a board called the raspy robot board which was a little motor controller board that also had a socket on it for the um ultrasonic rangefinder and a few other bits and bobs to make it easy to attach things and we actually sold the little roving robot kit which is um you know just a little two-wheel robot with a caster on the front and then um again with the rangefinder and the battery pack and things so we i've sort of messed around with that kind of thing uh but and we sell kits sort of to do with servo motors and things yeah as well that's probably a good moment to talk about your website actually so i'll uh just go over to my keynote thing here so if people haven't already checked out monkmakes.com if you head over to www.monkmakes.com and you can check out all the uh the different products that are on there and i had a look earlier and i saw the uh there's one that's like some rubber eyes i was quite fascinated by that yeah i forgot about that one actually that's for the product we have for the bbc micro bit which is a um it's uh just uses a couple of servo motors with a little adapter that allows you to attach a ping pong ball as an eyeball to it and then it's um so you can swivel the eyes independently if you want but it makes you make some nice little projects with with that so it's it's basically a laser cut chassis that's um you sort of bolt together yeah and then there's holes in the places to put a couple of servo motors on and yeah designing products which i actually enjoy very much as well but it's kind of a different process and a different way of doing things yeah so i said in your intro that you do split your time between sort of writing books and designing boards so uh tell me about the books i'm quite fascinated that that's how i first came to know about your work was um i bought this uh genius one so a great book by the way oh thank you that was actually the first book that i wrote um for uh about electronics and i'd yeah it i did it just when arduino is becoming popular and as i was learning arduino and yeah i just i started off really just of documenting what i was doing not really intending it to be anything that would be published and then i thought after i'd got really kind of a couple of chapters worth of um material i sent it around a few publishers didn't hear it you know mostly the uk ones and um threw in a couple of american ones as well just for luck and then one of the american ones came back and said which was mcgraw-hill who did the evil genius series of books there's a whole load of books in that series and they said the editor there uh said would you like to change around what you've done says it's an arduino evil genius project which was a great idea on his part yeah and it was just when arduino is becoming popular so it actually did very well then on the back of that i started writing um a few more books um at that time all about arduino different aspects of it um and this is pre raspberry pi and micro bit obviously and um yeah i found that i really enjoyed doing this and then eventually it kind of migrated over to being a full-time job and gave up the day job as it were or well there's a different story there but i won't go into that i left the day job shall we say and um yeah it's uh the writing did very well for a while but one of the things people were always asking is where do we get the components for your projects that you describe in these books yeah and it's a really difficult thing to do you go on to cpc or farnell or mouser or digikey and search for a 1k resistor and you will get like a you know a thousand results and i'm not even exaggerating you will get a thousand results so actually well which one of these do i need and but i just want to buy one i don't want to buy a hundred yeah so from springing from that really we started making kits and components largely to go with the books um in the first instance and then it's sort of taken on a life of its own really and now i'm spending more time on the business of than on writing books so most of my my writing is to do with um doing follow-on editions for books that are still selling worth enough well enough to justify the follow-on edition in the publisher's eyes so yeah but designing pcbs and things is a lot of fun i love laying out a pcb um actually laying out the tracks i don't like auto routers at all i much prefer to do that bit by hand it's a bit like you know it's doing a puzzle the joy is trying to connect all the bits that need to be connected without any of the wires across the tracks crossing over obviously and minimizing the number of times you have to jump from the top layer of the board to the bottom of the layer of board it's um it's good and the the tools for doing that are very accessible now as well yeah um we used to i used to use eagle cad for it all but now i've switched over to using kai-cad um for for new projects um yeah and it's very very nice piece of software and it's it's starting to mature and be a lot more um consistent in the user interface and how everything works uh so and you you it's a it takes a little bit of learning effort to get used to it but but once you do then you find that you can put boards together quite quickly yeah and and it's free yeah so um getting boards made is um you know in china in small quantities of prototypes is is very costly it's very full if you don't mind waiting a few weeks yeah sorry yeah i've been approached by quite a few um manufacturers of pcbs saying that you know will you um if you need anything for our for your projects you know come to my issue there is i haven't got enough skills yet in pcb designing i could certainly design them by hand but not through the software i just haven't i've got enough experience doing that yet so that's an area of stretch for me that i'm interested in uh looking at okay yeah i mean i did do a book on eagle cad but that's very out of date now it went to a couple of editions but then the second edition also hit the time when the eagle got acquired by autodesk and yeah changed everything yeah so it kind of killed the book really which is a bit of a shame yeah because it um but i'm contemplating a book well i actually started some notes and starting to do some work on a book on on kai cad yeah because i mean there are already books but they tend to be and there are a lot of good free resources and things but it often i think the trouble with three resources is they can be quite disjointed so they can you know get you started in a particular area but if you want really a kind of consistent body that you can work through and use as a reference then a book you can't really beat a book i think i certainly if i'm learning anything new i always go for a book i don't like training courses you know i've done them in the past but generally i think i'd rather spend 20 quid on a book and sit down and read it and yeah come back to it and look over certain bits and you know do it in a self-paced way yeah but i think it you know different people learn in different ways don't they it's just yeah what suits me but i would encourage you to have a play with kai-cat really do follow some of the the the videos and have a you know just draw a few you know go back to your um go back to your traffic light project let's see if you can knock that up and um because it's so nice when you it's it's like a lot of these things it's like blinking an led means so much more than just displaying a message on a screen and it's the same with pcb design actually drawing a pcb yeah and then um pressing the button basically to order it and then having it land on your doormat a couple of weeks later and think oh you know that's really cool that looks that looks quite nice it's so you get a buzz out of it it's good yeah i mean i did experiment with um i designed a circuit board um in just like a cad package um it's called for for the mac um i love autographs a lot of my illustrations in my book actually you might even notice that i don't know i did i did you did wonder yeah i did i noticed that yeah it's like the rounded uh rectangles and stuff in the shadows and things yeah i certainly recognize that so yeah i designed a circuit in that it was for a greenhouse robot using an arduino well an 80 mega three to eight p chip and um the idea would be that um this would be solar powered and it would monitor the health of some plants it would like you know the resistivity of the uh the soil and stuff like that and i designed a little pcb in omni on omni graffle i then printed it using a laser printer onto just regular paper and then you put that onto your copper plate and then iron it on and the idea is it transfers the toner onto the copper and then you get some ferric acid and etch away anything that hasn't got that ink over the top and the bit that i couldn't get to work right and i even bought an iron just to do this was the sort of transfer and i'd get these really patchy and not quite so i've got loads of like failed circuit boards and i kind of gave up on that in the end i used to do a similar thing with um i the the method i used was um you get used to get overhead progeny projector sheets that you could um that you could print on from an inkjet printer yeah um so that you print it onto this transparent sheet and then i made myself a uv light box just with a whole load of ultraviolet leds um all wired together and then um you could actually just do it with sunlight as well i didn't i did try but that but we live in lancashire you know it's not not a reliable method but it's um using the uv light box that yeah you could that you basically exposed this um coated pcb that you had to peel a protective film off and then you put it put that i used to clamp it in a picture frame and then expose it and then you had to put it through a developer first and then you'd put it in the ferric chloride to catch it out and like you say it's quite difficult to get that right because if you leave it if it's underexposed then you don't get enough of a copper left if it's overexposed it doesn't work either if you get the if you leave it in the cut you don't leave it in the copper long enough because you think it looks all right but it isn't and then you take it out and you know that's not ready and it's um not it's a very hit in this process the the chinese well we um we've used pcb way and jlc pcb and both um for if you just want like five pcbs or ten pcbs made yeah and all of our stuff is surface mount as well so we tend to get a stencil as well yeah even even by the time you've included shipping you you you might get your 10 pcbs for the cost of sort of um uh you know of that sort of thing for a cost of i don't know like 20 or 30 or something like that for ten so like three dollars each is really not worth having the chemicals or anything because yeah you know they've gone off or you've lost them or they've they're not very nice chemicals anyway to be perfectly honest or you get drop of it on your sink or any any clothes you destroy it um but yeah stainless steel is not stainless and in the presence of ferric chloride i can tell you that so it's really good too it's very easy just to get this this stuff made yeah and they have checks as well don't they before you submit it they have all kinds of root checking yeah yeah yeah the components and proximity i mean kevin i mean i'm full of admiration if you're designing this in omnigraffle but really if you draw the schematic in kicad and then you you make the default pcb from it and then you drag your components about and then you connect up you get these little you know air wires that you need to connect together with actual copper and it'll tell you when it's all done right so you draw your schematic and you do one check on it called [Music] electrical check that electrical erc electrical i don't know i can't know what the r stands for but that will um make sure that everything is connected together and there aren't any loose connections that you've forgotten about or anything and then when you switch over to the pcb view of your project you you can do a design rule check which will make sure that there's no tracks crossing over each other there's no things too close to each other that it's not going to actually work when you get to have the thing fabricating things and then like you say when it gets when you upload you just upload you generate some files called gerber files which is the computer edited manufacturing files upload them to the pcb service and then they do kind of a check which will render what the pcb will look like as well for you so you get kind of a bit of an idea of it um and yeah it's um very easy so we get the bare pcbs made in china going to monk mates now when we're actually making thousands of boards we get the bare pcbs made but then we actually have a machine for um stenciling pcbs in panels yeah and then picking placing components on from reels and putting them onto the boards and then we put them into a reflow oven that um that does it but i mean that that's the typical of our boarding that it's a it's one of our relay relay boards there's not very many components on it so it's not particularly demanding of the pick and place machine so we can get away with having a fairly budget end of the spectrum for these these yeah but um yeah no it's um i'd encourage anybody who fancies having to go at making pcbs to give it a go it's it's easier than you think and here's one um that i did a couple of years ago before my soul room was eddie paper do you know and there's a sort of rat's nest on the back and you can see slightly scalded bits of yeah yeah but the idea is and it did work that that did actually work when it was all soldered up and everything you put the chip in the holder there crystal and the ceramic uh bits and bobs but yeah they do work i did a video recently on how to build your own arduino basically it's just an 18 mega chip yeah now it is it's very um straightforward there's not an awful lot to those things um yeah the the full blown arduino uno um the commercial one is incredibly robustly engineered it's yes um and you can actually get away with an awful lot less if you're just making one yourself you really don't need all the bells and whistles for it yeah and you're absolutely right i remember looking at um how to i wanted to build something that would connect to a computer in some way and i found like um a pic thing i think it was in maplins uh which is sadly now no longer with us but like yeah and they were a bit like tandy as well you could go in there and buy i think that's where i bought the the book from actually the uh the 30 arduino projects for the evil genius i think that was from maplins whenever i went into mappings and preston i always used to put them to the front of the book part of the section so maybe you picked up one of their i might well have done that one yeah guerilla marketing well it clearly worked yeah and um that was one of the uh you know the thing that got me into the arduino i'd seen that thought ah right finally there's something that has lots of great documentation and therefore yeah you know can can sort of take me to where i want to be which was building robots with arduinos that's why i love these smart robots so much i've not got one to hand actually but um they they're powered by an arduino uno with a little motor shield on top and it makes it very easy to sort of um put together a robot that actually works just with a 3d printer yeah so one of the funny things i just wanted to share with people about sort of how we how we met was through a mutual friend joe santarcangelo so we worked in a school together me and joe about 15 or 16 years ago and we sort of kept in touch ever since and he's noticed that you know i started this youtube channel about robotics and so on and they said oh i've got a friend or you know i go to these raspberry pi jams with and uh you should get in touch with each other and i'd already bought a few of your books at this point and didn't know that you know you were the simon monk that's like jokingly said and you'd sent me this kit the uh the monk makes um starter kit and i was reading through the uh the instructions and i've read quite a few instruction manuals in my time and i thought blimey this is really well written and it was at that moment the light bulb went on i was like no he's not the simon says let me just go and check and i was like yep that's that's the same one in the back you know it's got the uh the monk makes thing like oh wow that's why it's so well written oh thank you very much yeah so um yeah that was the second book i bought um by yourself which is the bbc micro bit one so when the micro bit first came out i was a little bit um not unimpressed but i thought oh there's a bit too much on there they've made it a bit too easy so there's all there's so many um you know components jammed in here accelerometers and um what else we've got on leds and buttons and so on you know i kind of been a little bit dismissive of it however i'd since really come to to like this i bought them the more recent version as well it's got the um it's got the speaker on the microphone and it can even do speech synthesis it's crazy on board um so you know the fact that you've built an entire ecosystem that's really easy to uh connect things up with these uh crocodile clips you know i'm a big fan i'm definitely a convert to that so just quickly sort of highlighting how we how we plug these things together let me just put that wrong one on there actually apparently that's that's we had a big debate really about whether it was better to try and use the ring connectors and alligator clips or to just make a socket that you just plug the micro bit into yeah and we sort of came down to the conclusion that the the trouble with just plugging the micro bit into a socket is that you're not really learning anything about the electronics that's right the thing about an alligator clip is that you if you're using a relay with it you've got a you can kind of see the circuit so you've got if you've got a relay and a battery and a motor you can see the wire linking them all up together and so you start to understand get an appreciation of what's going on electronically yeah it's more visceral software but i mean as a tool for just for teaching um programming then the microbit is great because you get that wow factor of actually making leds light and things that you don't necessarily get with pure software on its own so yeah yeah this is a really simple board just yeah nice to make a little slider and that's one of the things i love about robotics it's kind of the intersection of three different skill sets it's that the program inside which can be just purely programming you're not really thinking about anything else yeah logic then there's the electronic side which is very hands-on and yeah you're able to sort of create things electronically and interface with the software and then there's the physical mechanical design of the robot where you build out you know a chassis or some kind of mechanical arm or something that was the area i was always worst at so when 3d printers became affordable i was like this is the thing that's going to solve my problem because i can design things in fusion 360 and i use blender before i got into fusion 360 to sort of design things in 3d um so yeah that that to me was the kind of missing part and then the electronics part i knew some fundamentals but not not the deep theory behind you know how all this works my dad's always saying oh you should read up on this properly and really understand the you know the the the theory behind electronics rather than just trying things out well it's cheaper yeah so tell me about what are some of the great greatest challenges you have when you're um you're you're thinking about the electronics boards or or even when you're writing the book what are some other sort of challenges you you come up against uh yeah i think um because i've my background i spent so long in software that i don't really have any any fears from the from the software point of view i sort of find that side of it probably the easiest part um i think my electronics you mentioned earlier my first degree was cybernetics it was actually cybernetics computer science it's like a joint honors and the cybernetics had a reasonable amount of electronics uh it was mostly electronics and control theory so there was quite a i did at least kind of get exposed to the theory even though i didn't really use any of it for about 20 years until i come back to design boards now and also get involved in more hefty sort of textbooks textbook style electronic books that are purely about electronics so there was a bit of challenge for me to get back into the electronic side of things and revisit all the you know bits of sort of little bits of theory that you need i mean you know ninety percent of what you do in electronics is ohm's law or the power law yeah if you know those two you pretty much got most of the design decisions covered and an awful lot of the rest of it just comes from data sheets you know you want to use a particular chip you will find the recommended decoupling capacity you put across the powersupply you will find that you know the recommended resistor values and some simple calculations for other components that you need so i always start with the data sheet and you it's kind of the the um it's the path of least resistance and it's the thing that's it's going to work if it uses the data sheet so yeah the data sheet for chips is pretty much almost like a legal document if you do everything that says in this stock in this data sheet your circuit will work and if it doesn't it's our fault not yours so it's always it gives you that extra security as a way of designing um 3d design is something i've always found difficult i've wrestled with it a couple of times i've never really got to grips with you know something like fusion or whatever um generally i try and find somebody who's good at that stuff and ask them to do it for me i just find it easier you can you kind of you have sort of room for so many skills in your head and then they start falling out the other side and 3d printing never something i've needed to do or 3d modelling never something i've needed to do often enough that i can remember how on earth i do it next time i come to need to do it yeah um so it's um that that's sort of where i i'd love to see a book actually with something like mechanical engineering for dummies that kind of covered yeah things more basic mechanical engineering stuff all the way up to things like 3d printing and 3d modelling and that would be quite quite an interesting but i buy that book that's one of one of the interviews i'd like to do in the future i have asked if he is interested and he is is the um the guy who invented the smiles robot um he he was a student um an engineering student design student and he sort of designed this in his spare time quite quickly actually i think he'd only done a few prototypes they'll i'll find one just so i can show you kind of what it looks like so the these small robots they've got the rangefinder at the front um it's very modular so you can um just move that back you can take these things off and slide them on and they're all 3d printed parts so they're getting distracted here so the the wheels all all um 3d printed and even even the tracks what's really neat about this if i just get that to zoom in you can see that uses filament as the pivot now this is the kind of innovation that's really smart yeah yeah nice idea and it uses the um n20 motors they're a really small motor have plenty of torque on them but they're very cheap about seven pounds by each something like that plenty of torque on them and um yeah the original version was for a an arduino so it's designed that you'd slot the arduino in but i've sort of changed up the design a bit and have a raspberry pi pico there so i can use some micro python and instead of the uh the motor shield i've just got a little um little board there that you can plug into the um into the peacock you could also do that with the micro bit i've made a micro bit version and this particular one has got um a wireless charger underneath so it's got like a contactless charger so it's quite neat yeah yeah very good yeah and then i shrunk that one down to do a really small version of that so this is uh with a um what's it called a tiny 2040 from pimeroni so there's a tiny little um raspberry pi compatible chip just sat in the back there and it has a laser rangefinder on the front as well these are really great i didn't i think you could have a laser for you know less than 100 pounds or something these things are like a pound they're very cheap so it's just a little little um is it an l i can't remember the knee um i can't remember that but yeah they're they're a lot smaller than the ultrasonic rangefinders yeah and a lot more accurate yeah um don't have quite as big a range i don't think do they they can't go outside but it is incredible that you buy a little chip that's got a laser laser coming out of the front of it that's it but not in a dangerously exciting way it just tells you how far away things are that's not going to blind anybody yeah and what i like about these smiles robots is that as well as being configurable just grab another one there the modularity of it is um really quite useful so this one has um on the back a line following module i just had this apart before that's why it's sort of half stuck out the top so yeah you can just plug that into the into the top of the arduino and then you know you can sense whether or not it's on a line you can make it follow a line around a track so very simple to print this out and put the module that's just in there and add to it so you can you can really build these things out add bluetooth to them to make them controllable remotely from an app so i've played around with that as well and i was that obsessed with these i started like a fan site because there was lots of information sort of scattered around everywhere but nothing in a central place where i created smartphone.com as my place to sort of put this and then i thought i like too many different types of robot not just the smiles robot i first started building a an in-move robot and uh i'd sort of overstretch there by trying to build something that's physically too big that took a long time to print and also my programming skills weren't really up to it at that point either so i've since learnt python to a reasonable level anyway so i could i could go back to that but i've actually quite enjoyed the small robots so that's that's my area of interest really so um back to yourself then um so when you go through designing your bots do you have like a process or is it more experimental do you think there's a there's a need in the market for this type of board or sensor yeah quite often it comes out of conversations with um sort of either you know our retailers or or you know people who use our products um we just say it'd be great if you had a board that did this and it it's um i in terms of what it should do and what it should look like and things i don't i do actually start with a on a you know blank page on my notebook a few bullet points what are the features of this thing should have and then a sketch of it to give an idea of what it should should look like um and then having done that i'll generally get a i'll make a small batch prototype like we were talking about before so i'll design the schematic i'll make the you know get a some small quantity of pcbs um hand pick and place the components on them um and then get them yeah one of our sensor boards and then put it on uh you know send it out to a few people quite often to have a play with see what they think and then um yeah sort of if it's looks everybody like if people like it still and it still looks like it's going to be a reasonable product then we'll do a first batch and we always do a quite a small first batch of maybe like 100 or 200 and then if it if it sells well then we order a big quantity of panels and make up lots of them and and see how it goes so it's um yeah it's all sorts of different sources for sort of inspiration for where actually we start off making something quite often actually for a lot of my more maker oriented products rather than the micro bit stuff it's because i want a board that does this so you know it's the servo board is a typical case of that it's connecting servos to something you built on breadboard in a pain in the neck loads of male jumper wires trying to fit into the sockets on the servo motors i just wanted something that would really make it really easy to connect up yeah half a dozen servo motors to control pins and to accept their power from something with the scrutum and a block that i can put a battery pack onto and you know and so that would be the kind of motivation for that yeah and chances are if you want it somebody else wants it as well because they're having the exact same kind of challenges that you're having yes you always hope that you're not the only person in the world who happens to want this particular thing sometimes they don't there's no way of predicting it that's the bizarre thing about our products you you can um make something you think that's just such a good idea that's going to sell so well yeah we've thought about this and then you find that nobody really buys it no idea why one of the things i really like on these boards is where you've got the monk makes logo there's a little led that lights up when you power the board it's nice touch isn't it that's really nice yeah little orange led that yeah not too bright that just looks like a slightly uh deficient tungsten light bulb so i kind of kind of getting a bit dated really isn't it having a logo that's a it's a light bulb i don't know i i quite like that i like the uh the fact it tells you that there is power going through and you've not you've not wired it incorrectly that's true yes it's a good first debugging um idea yeah yeah um that was another one that we were looking at earlier which was the uh the connection yeah this is um yeah our first departure into having something to connecting plugging a micro bit into but yeah really we've done it to kind of open up extra pins on the yeah on the microphone i mean there's lots of other similar products out there but we tried one of the things we wanted to do is carry through the ordinary ring connector so you can still see them use them because a lot of them don't most of them don't do that actually they just um you've now plugged your micro bit into something it's now an appliance where we kind of like the connecting things together thing yeah but the um it's really useful to have the i squared c uh connections of the micro bit available um because uh you get a lot of nice little oled displays and things that you can plug onto that i squared c interface just with some jumper wires and it's other people want to do that quite a lot so i thought would make a nice easy way of doing it yeah when you were talking earlier about data sheets um yeah i've looked through quite a few data sheets for various different boards and one of them was about an i squared c i was trying to understand how you get this thing to work i was trying to get something to work in micropython where there wasn't a library that existed already for this so i was like what do we need to do what bits do we need to bang into that boss to make it come to life and yeah i was reading through the data sheet and like i said it is like a legal document it tells you precisely how this thing should work yeah but no nice easy example that you can just type in that'd be lovely wouldn't it save so much time i you do get the sort of i've done a few sort of implementations from scratch of talking to i squared c devices and you do sort of there is a kind of pattern to it and that people tend to use registers so you write things into a register and then that does something on the device kind of thing yeah so you move away from the thinking about the bit banging and what what's actually the information being transferred and think in terms of putting things in registers and then yeah again from the software point of view you want to try and encapsulate that in the library and yeah save somebody else and pain if you possibly can yeah and actually it's amazing how often i mean there are so many really good libraries out there that you find that people have developed yeah that's a seven segment um display a bit a retro display really for the micro bit so i did a project recently using one of these um if i've got it in the background it's um just over there it was the uh the time machine console from back to the future and i had a whole bunch of these and that's where i was figuring out how to use um shift registers so that i could put you know a digit in and then move it along so i didn't have to have thousands of wires all hanging off the back yeah yeah i mean that one we use the serial interface to actually talk to the board because um the i squared in i squared c interface on the micro bit is hidden away on the little pins in between the big rings yeah so um and and of course you need two pins whereas if you're actually just wanting to send data to a display yeah um you can use the somewhat old-fashioned uart serial interface so that you just effectively send messages and you you're really only tying up one of the data pins of the micro bit yeah um so it's um you've lost the electronics of how the roof display is being refreshed and all that kind of thing but at least you do know that you're sort of kind of communicating with the board and you've got to buy the board with power and things so you're getting something out of the connecting it up i think as well yeah and then most recently the the sort of new kid on the block not too new now but um i suppose it's still not that old yeah i really like the peak the pico is is the it's the best arduino you can buy yes i think really for the money absolutely it's it's good value the i like the the microcontroller is fantastic i think i really like the job that the raspberry pi foundation have done on the design for that it's got yeah a lot of the things that you would want um and you know from a software people come from big software two cores oh you can do two things at once that saves a lot of the pain of having to watch for key presses and refresh a display or monitor sensor values or something you can at least um do that yeah without worrying about horrendously complicated state machines or trying to work out how to code it you can make life a lot easier for yourself and the programmable i o stuff is incredible so if you want to drive neopixels or something you don't even need to do any actual tire either of your cores you can actually have that running on the pins to some extent and the power supply is well very well designed on that so they use the type of power supply called a buck boost so that yeah that means you can supply it with lower than it needs load and it operates at 3.3 volts so you can either fight with lower than 3.3 and it boosts it to that voltage or you can split with slightly more and it drops it back to that voltage so it means insert for powering your pico from batteries it just makes it very easy you can you can you know do it with a couple of aaa cells or you can do it with a lithium polymer battery or yeah it's a fairly wide range of voltages so it's a very nice design board the only thing that i thought was insane was that the um or the left the thing telling you what the pins do is on the underside where you can't see it once you're stuck into a piece of breadboard so one of our products that we're actually very pleased with i can't quite see if that is one of our breadboards but we had some we've had breadboards made that have the um pin names of the pico um actually on the breadboard so that once you've plugged your picot into the breadboard you can actually just look at the breadboard to see which pin you're connecting to what rather than have to try and cross reference it to a diagram that it always goes wrong you always get one out or you know and counting down the number of pins you shouldn't be counting things they should have a label on them yeah so we tried to solve that problem with that with our breadboard for pico product and we sell a lot of them actually which is quite pleasing yeah but yeah i do like the pico and i i've always been a big fan of arduino but the the problem with the official arduino boards has always been that they're much too expensive yeah they're very good quality and i can see why they're expensive but for a lot of makers and a lot of educational settings they're just much too expensive um and the something like the pico um and although you you you can program the pico um in python and that's probably the best place to start when you're getting to learn about how to use it and particularly if you've already done some python or you've learned python at school or something but you can also approach the prep program of the pico as an arduino which i think um you know in c um and um i can't remember the name of the guy but he's done an absolutely fantastic job of creating what's called an arduino core which basically allows you to use other types of board within the arduino integrated development environment as if they were a genuine arduino yeah and it it's just um very good very very you get that extra bit of performance as well doing it on c rather than doing it in python yeah so yeah now i'm a big fan of the pica me too i think for me one of the things that made it really successful is that you've got that flash storage as well as the ram so it's a bit like having a desk you know a hard disk on the micro processor board that you can have these because python programs are quite efficient size-wise but they're not as small as a c program but if you if you um one of the challenges that um camillo had with his auto diy robot so this runs on an arduino nano inside if you sort of pull its head open and have a look what sort of running that it's an arduino yeah and the software he's written for this is so extensive that it runs out of memory and crashes if you have everything enabled yeah now with micropython you could write a really clever program that manages the memory so that it only loads things in when you need them and doesn't max out the ram because the script can be as long as you like you can write a very large script in is it 16 megs of of cache of flash memory so it's just the next generation of processor the arduino um stuck with the atmega yeah you know chips which are really sort of chips from the 1990s i think aren't they they're quite quite dated tiny amounts of memory which sometimes that's absolutely fine that's all you need but then you know the modern generation a good yeah i think the i i'm actually quite well they're not atmel anymore they're microchip aren't they they've been bought by microchip the atmel uh yeah company the people who make the chips on the original arduinos but they they have brought up to date some of their microcontrollers um in a really nice way the 80 tiny yeah well the 80 tiny 1614 is sort of my my favorite low power microcontroller at the moment and the the um rp 2040 is my favorite sort of high power microcontroller as i would classy and um one of the things that you don't get with a pico with the rp2040 microcontroller on the pico is you don't get very much output current from your gpio pins yeah um so you you're really supposed to i think keep it on i don't know the exact figure but a few milliamps whereas the um the 80 tiny 1614s you can draw sort of 40 milliamps for a few of the pins this is the total budget of current as well and so they'll do do much higher current um and for example the seven segment display you showed up there before if you're careful about the duty cycle and things you can avoid you can drive it directly from the microcontroller so that microcontroller is one of the sort of new generation of microchip low low low cost um yeah microcontrollers that's absolutely fine for something like controlling a display or whatever yeah now one of the things that drives me a little bit nuts though about the um micro python environment because i'm a very big fan of python and micropython particularly but it's very different depending which board you use if you have a micro bit or you have a pico the same piece of code doesn't necessarily run on both of them because one might use the um machine machine.pin yeah you out and the other one might use board dot something if it's like a circuit python or if it's the micro bit i think the um the make micro bit make code website has full python so it's different again so things like you know getting the onboard led to flash i think damian's trying to address this in a later version of python he's trying to bring things together but it's a little bit fragmented at the moment in uh trying to get everything it's this idea of having a hardware abstraction layer so yeah yes you have a you have a as a class that has all the stuff that's specific to the pico and you have a club you know classes all the stuff that's to do with the micro bit but then within those classes when it comes to actually doing things with pins or even whether the pin is a class or or how they're arranged in you know in a hierarchy is completely different there's people that always seem to go their own way on this rather than sort of kind of adopt um a sort of standard approach to the hardware abstraction layer which which would make life easier when you're switching between boards yeah i must admit you see it even with the micro bit between using circuit python and using micropython exactly it looks quite different how you um access the features of the board yeah which makes it difficult for the beginner because you'd expect to do things the same way in many ways the arduino ide provides if you like a very good hardware abstraction layer because the stuff that you can do you can program a picot on the arduino ide or a micro bit on the arduino ide and the way you deal with pins will be pretty much exactly the same yeah and so it is a very good i'm a big fan of the arduino integrated development environment it's really now the biggest strength of the platform i think yeah the the uno will always kind of be the standard arduino board and it and it's great from that point of view and it's very robust and you know good board um but the power that you get from the integrated development environment where you can attach everything from you know a micro bit to a raspberry pi pico to um the espresso esp32 based boards which you've got yeah you know a bit like a pico but you've got wi-fi and bluetooth as well for a few quid yeah quite you know and you can do all of this stuff in exactly the same way on the arduino ide so i think it's a very good unifying platform from that point of view it's funny you should mention that the esp chips because whenever i do a video on the raspberry pi pico and the benefits and you know stolen the virtues of this people say yeah but you can do that in the sp 32 or an 8266 chip why don't you do that instead because it has wi-fi as well and it's like well they're a bit more expensive you know for that extra bit of wi-fi do you really need that in your project what if you just don't need that so i quite like that the pure you know the purest approach with the the pico it doesn't have anything it doesn't need and if you need something like that yeah you can do yeah exactly well i think it's with most projects it's a case of and unfortunately learning a bit about all of these different boards and getting some skill in all of them then picking the one that's right for your projects isn't it so you don't need wi-fi there's no point in having a wi-fi board really yeah um and i think uh yeah the other little niggly things with some of the esp-based boards is that um when you upload a program onto them you have to wait quite a long time i seem to remember yeah you know you got you which isn't a big thing but then if if like me you do a lot of small incremental changes rather than bang a load of coded and then spend three years debugging it yeah i find it it's it's quite annoying if i had to wait whereas the pico is very quick to upload i'm not quite sure how they do that trick with the arduino ide because yeah i would assume it's just copying stuff into an eeprom but um for some reason they don't have to copy as much or it works faster or something but it definitely definitely a lot better and that's one of the things i like about micropython is you can do that incremental changes very quickly you can iterate through you know your development without having to sort of wait for the compiler to sort of create all the code it just does what you need it to when you need it yeah because well you can experiment from the command line yes and the read event repo for read event loop that lets you just type in python commands yeah um with what it already knows about the program it's just run so you can even look at variables and see what's going on a bit it's a great debugging environment to yeah if you find anything's not working quite how they should do yeah and i think that you know once you've learned one probe in language it's not too difficult to sort of transfer that skill to another one it's more of a dialect thing isn't it i mean yeah yeah when i looked at python originally i was a bit confused by things like why doesn't it have a select case statement you know why can't you do why'd you have to do if if else if else if else else if all that kind of stuff why can't you just you have like a case select statement and funnily enough the new version of python python 3.10 has exactly that they call it pattern matching i think yeah i don't like that structure yeah absolutely one of my pet hates i don't i really don't like case switching case statements thing yeah if just use if yeah well it lends itself to spaghetti doesn't it exactly yeah yeah well it's mostly just laziness because i can never remember the syntax but i i'm quite happy with if i'll stick with it thanks very much that's it so you were saying before about um you know you you were learning some programming language you became very familiar with so was that c or what was the languages that you were 20 years in software before i released it came back to this so yeah most of them really i mean i do very fond of anybody who's programmed in small talk will rant on for hours about how wonderful small talk is and it is it is the best programming language i'm not going to take any argument from anybody with this they've actually programmed in small talk on that one it it's credibly productive and people don't like it because it hasn't got source code files and i think where's the source code i mean your system is there you change it till it does what you want and then you freeze it and uh it strips out all the rubbish you don't need and you're left with the functioning program that's uh really easy to maintain and properly object oriented so yeah i'll stop there because otherwise i'll just go on all night about but um i think well i started with uh actually fortran 77 and then yeah c and then uh lisp common lisp um and then after that well then it was small talk and then i spent a lot of time doing java enterprise stuff yeah and then um ended up doing most of the stack so i i do know how to do sort of um you know javascript as opposed to jar but people think often think they're the same yeah they're totally different languages and um yeah and then embedded language and then python came to sort of when it became started to become a thing for embedded computing i had a look at python uh and did a book on that with uh using python with the raspberry pi yeah and then um yeah ruby on rails ruby is quite a nice language if the world is not ready for small talk yet ruby is not a bad alternative and ruby is quite an easy language to learn it's a bit strange in that it often has multiple ways of doing exactly the same thing which a lot of programmers hate i just want you know give me the best way of doing this i don't want to know three other ways of doing it i just want the best way and ruby's a little bit like that you can do some sort of strange things with it but it's actually a very powerful um language and its power comes from its being fairly purely object-oriented which um python sadly isn't but but python is a good one to start with this is what i learned when i was at university javascript one point okay it's literally just been renamed from live script okay that's how old this particular book is but i've never really taken to javascript to be honest uh it's a strange language it's because it's a what they call a prototyping language rather than a pure object-oriented language so yeah you make a thing and then you make a copy of the thing rather than defining the class of a thing and what what what that means in terms of what everything about that class so it's um it's unusual it's actually very powerful language um javascript but it's uh it can make for incredibly unpleasant code and the kind of the obsession with never waiting for for a method for a function to return always using callbacks and things leads you to these long horrible chains and then they put sort of syntactic sugar into the language to try and make that more transparent and i just think surely the compiler should be handling that sort of stuff for me let me just express my ideas and have it function please compiler i don't want to know about all this um asynchronous stuff yeah and i was a fan of java for for a while when it was um sun microsystems when they owned it and uh developed it was completely open source it kind of took a dark turn i think when oracle bought it and made it a bit more proprietary and more enterprise oriented a lot of companies have spent a lot of money making java based stuff but yeah yeah i spent a lot of time on java enterprise stuff and the the pro the problem with java is really that um it's to what you call over patterns so if you want you can't you don't just do something you first of all define an interface that describes what you want to do it it's a little bit about a gripe i have with with c to some extent yeah why do i need a header class and a c and and all the compiler is going to do is whinge until i've made them agree with each other and at least the arduino has the good grace to sort of hide that from you so you don't need to do that but um it's rather similar in java you end up with long complicated patterns you know sort of yeah that okay they add flexibility and i think also to some extent they keep java programmers in work as well perfectly list about it yeah and i think it's now been taken over i think by python as the most world's most popular language it is yeah i believe so yeah yeah i mean it's a great integration language it's great for tying together a bit so yeah i've done a bit of sort of playing about with machine learning projects really just my own interest is it's something i thought i needed to understand yeah and um that as a all of you know the machine learning stuff um you know it's all wrapped in python so that you can and actually done very nicely so that you can kind of um yeah you know just to plug in different types of engine to make your inferences for you yeah so yeah it's it's a good good from that point of view there's just some things in it that kind of make it look a little bit like a bedroom language yeah it's it's not it this does not look like something designed by computer scientists let's put it that way but it so on it works you know people take to it people learn it quite quickly and um you know it's the first language i don't think there's much wrong with it yeah it's interesting that it's um in some areas like data science that is the language to learn you know have the numpy and pandas to you know take things that you might be doing in excel or in i don't know sql databases jupiter notebook if you're playing notebook absolutely that's really nice because you kind of weave your code in with them yeah comment with with story about what you're doing and then you can sort of have all these little scripts and you can just create a sort of workflow from them so yeah very productive environment absolutely i i find sometimes when i'm experimenting or trying to shape something i might go to a jupiter notebook and try it out because i love the fact you can just re-run the steps just to the bit where you're working on and then carry on it's fantastic like i said very productive very and then put your comments in between it even like mark down comments yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah so back to my questions let's see what else we've got on here um so one of the questions that ovi uh who's our first guest on here he said um where do you think the field of robotics will um help improve our lives and the environment so is there anywhere you think it hasn't touched yet where it might be um a nascent market or well i don't i think i think domestic appliances have still got a long way to go i got all excited when you know we've discovered that our washing machine actually had a wi-fi uh and hardware in it i thought brilliant i can i can i have like a raspberry pi in the house that doesn't controls a lot of the light switches and various other little projects i've got going on it i feel fantastic i'll buy you know washing machine will be able to tell me when it's finished washing or i'll be able to turn it on when electricity's cheap or i'll be able to do all sorts of clever things no not a chance it's kind of you know it's all closed proprietary um belongs to the manufacturer they will sell you some rubbish software that won't do what you want anyway yeah and it's a that's a waste of time so i would love to see it's kind of not quite robotics really but i would love to see those kind of interfaces mandated to be standard it's the sort of thing that the eu would do brilliantly yeah and just say right you're going to do this now you can know you know you've got to you like the cookies policy and other things like that or vacuum cleaners that don't use megawatts yeah it's like you know everybody whinges about it and then they do it and they think yeah why wouldn't we do that years ago that's a brilliant idea so i i think it would be nice to see some of that going in and i think in terms of um you know balancing sort of the national grid and things like that or you can see so many opportunities when you start to allow sort of sensible use of electricity so that as we rely more and more on renewables we've got to be an awful lot smarter about that because we don't have the the base load generation knocking them out there and if people's cars can contribute to that when they're not being used as long as you know you have some kind of promise arrangement that is if i promise to give you a hundred miles range in your car in the morning but you can do what you like with the battery overnight or whatever you know yeah those well that's the smart grid stuff is gonna have to have to come in yeah um i think yes i thought that would be good uh i think i mean self-driving vehicles we're gonna i i'm looking forward to that day i particularly like driving so actually having a mechanical chauffeur brilliant idea i'd love that um i think the machine a lot of the machine learning stuff is very interesting but um edge impulse has to follow that what they're up to because they've got some lovely little demos with a micro bit where you can teach it things and this is so you basically do all your training on high powered computing somewhere and then you download a tiny little model that just knows how something works so yeah room occupancy is a it's a classic example of this where you just you connect some sensors up to a processor which could be a picot or a micro bit doesn't have to be a particularly high powered thing has to be a bit more than arduino you know you're struggling with that that's this you really need the current generation of microcontrollers to do that but yeah but not the fantastic you know not fantastically powerful machines by any means yeah um and then you you just um having trained some data and put this model onto your device it can then just look at sensors and work out yep i think there's somebody in the room or no i don't think there's anybody in the room and turn the light on or off having been trained having learned how to do that from example data yeah and i think we'll see that in more and more um things and then i i think it'll be it's an exciting time i think it's really interesting to acknowledge that yeah and i think things like sort of smart speakers will get a lot smarter so they're still pretty stupid aren't they and they don't really remember what you said to them yes it's like um so how where that's the point where you're actually having a sensible conversation with them not about philosophy or anything but just about what you want your likes to do would be a big step forward i think and that that will um i'm sure that will come and that will just simply you know be improving all the time i think from now on yeah i think i think for me that the golden standard of where we need to get to with with uh these smarts i don't want to say because i've got a room full of smart devices that will respond if i say their name yeah but yeah there used to be a tv program that bbc made um in the 80s i'm going to say called star cops and he had there was a guy in that and he had a little box he called it box and it was like an ai and he could have a conversation with it he could say you know book me the tickets at the cinema and he could ask it questions a bit like we would do with our smart home assistants but he would have that conversational thread it would carry on conversations and remind him rather than just being quiet and only knowing you know one or two levels deep exactly that's it they only go one you know two levels deep really at the moment don't they so you can say play this play this music and then i'll play this music on my hi-fi and then you can say play some play the radio and then say do you want to play on hi-fi and you can say yes that's the entire debt most deep conversation i've ever had with the smart speaker i've never had anything more more than that and i'll do a try occasionally because i when it does happen nobody will tell us it'll just suddenly start working better won't it and you'll find that you can do these things yeah because um people at google or amazon have put a lot of effort into this stuff yeah yeah i mean one of the most popular videos on my channel is a build your own ai video and um what i've done with that is i simply used um the google speech service so i have a microphone it's all in python and i have the um speech recognition which is like a wrapper library which does all the clever stuff in the background you can do it on device but i've just connected it to google because it's like the best quality speech recognition doesn't need any training and then there's some pretty simple skeleton code depending on what you say and what it brings back as the speech string you can make it do something so i've got it to like tell jokes or bad jokes what else does it do to get the weather for where you are currently um it can have a list you can add things to or take things away from and i've just built up a few skills like that and it's surprising how advanced that seems to be with just quite straightforward code in python you know i think it's that speech engine that really makes that work not even trying to be particularly smart about it just kind of looking for patterns and i think you know that's a good sort of interim approach isn't it because yeah it does rely if you if you found somebody in who didn't know what it was capable of yeah then it wouldn't work so well would it because you know what it can do and you know how to talk to it it's kind of um you've got a common frame of reference haven't you for making it do what you want to do yeah so yeah that's that's what you want most of the time yeah yeah and for me you talked about self-driving cars i think the the auto industry has got a long way to go to improve the software in cars because at the moment it's like it's like the first generation of mobile phones where they had software but it wasn't very good and every single phone seemed to be unique in how it worked the menu structure and you know and i think with cars you know the the entertainment system or the menu that you have on the screen because they all tend to have a screen now don't they the soft center console and it's very hit and miss so i've got a few different cars and they all have very different software that works in very different ways and i think i'd like to see like a common operating system you know across all of them so you could have like you know your linux or your mac or your windows type thing but specific to cars and there's a lot of rich data that you could have there um that's locked away in that car you can't access you know your mileage or where you've been on your car unless you've had an app outside of that ecosystem like just a google map recording where you've been but you know this there's probably so much more rich data that you could get from that if if only you'd need a very carefully designed api for that kind of thing wouldn't you yeah it's kind of um once you step into the realm of the safety critical stuff yeah manufacturers are not going to particularly want to be able to either expose data that would implicate them in some way or actually allow you to do things like turn your car off while you're driving or anything like that just just because you fancy linking up an arduino to you it's a lot of recipe for disaster there isn't there but i do absolutely with you it would be lovely going back to my washing machine thing if these things just right look just let them talk mqtt we said life would be wonderful we could have all sorts of fun for making little projects and there'd be a huge ecosystem of people making um add-ons for these things and displays and what have you you know that'd be good something as simple as like you know your car's finished charging or do you want it to start charging so i have a renault zoe electric car and there's a there's an api that they don't tell you about but you can access and it's just a very simple like a token to send to it to to authenticate and you can grab all the data from you can see how much mileage you've got you know how charged it is whether you want to turn on the air conditioning or not you can do all that through an api i quite like the fact that that's there but it should be a bit more open in my opinion yeah so basically this is an unofficial api that somebody else has worked out the details of people are using it yeah so yeah it's but that i mean that's great i mean i've done a um i've got a plug-in hybrid we weren't quite ready to make the leap into pure electric but i think probably next time we will i know next time we will um but one of the things i wanted to make myself was because we have um solar panels on the roof is to make a diverter so that when we're generating excess solar we put it into the car so free fuel why not absolutely i definitely see that as being a future direction for almost every house you would have um because even if you've not got you know i mean the uk doesn't have a lot of sunshine but we do have you know it's not pitch black we do have some passive sunshine so if you get a south facing roof you can collect as much as you like and then yeah starting like a power wall that kind of thing some 18 650 batteries in some kind of safe configuration you can just save it to that and then use it when you need to yeah yeah i think um yeah there's um there's some interesting sort of um uh open source projects aren't there for making your own power type thing that i think i've been quite tempted to have a go at that kind of thing but it's one of those things even that if you if you want to give yourself a decent amount of storage you yeah there is no escaping that it's going to cost you thousands it's that is the problem with it and that maker projects are fine and i usually have a budget but it's not usually thousands exactly so it's never a thousand so let's be honest yeah yeah i have a friend who uh he buys um old laptop batteries off ebay and uh they usually have more than eighty percent left in them when he gets them because the screen's broken or something but the battery pack in it they're usually 18 650s and you can usually you know get a pair of them and balance them and so on so yeah he's got quite a few he takes it camping with him so he's got you know a bit of power for tv and his uh electric shower and stuff like that yeah yeah yeah good yeah so so yeah i think that's one of the areas i thought would be uh good for improvements of the auto industry and um and even just like the home i mean we have um quite a few different platforms for for home automation but i still don't think i think we're still missing a trick with that and i believe um apple and google and who's the other one they're all kind of getting together in a green a standard um protocol for talking to all the different devices so it really will open out when they do that yeah yeah i use um uh node red and mq3t on a on a raspberry pi yeah and i talked to sonoff light switches he got flashed with um a firmware called tasmota i think or tasmoto yeah i have a few of them it's all right but i'm fairly conscious that um if that raspberry pi dies then it can be a serious amount of paint we're not going to be able to do very much at all yeah yeah don't trust those relays at full load no absolutely not um lights just switch lights we i had some on heaters for um we got a workshop they're turning them on the timer and they've all one by one fused uh switching at 13 amps oh 10 ounce even i think yeah but yeah don't don't believe what it says on the writing on the thing they don't do that but they're okay for lights and things because i believe that that's a bit of a design flaw in that they've got this uh solder track and you really just relying on the fact that that carry the current you know is it 10 amps this is supposed to be able to carry so i've seen a lot of projects where they go up there's a wire that's you know the correct bridge is it yeah better way of doing it there also the relays are cheap relays uh they don't they can't cope with um the current they say they can cope with yeah i mean to be honest that looks like a label that whoever made that is stuck over the top of what it originally said on the relay but the great thing with these is they they are an esp8266 chip underneath yeah i think it's yeah and so it's got wi-fi you can program it with the uh arduino ide i've done that you can even load with funny um micropython onto these so okay i've done that as a project quite recently it's one of those things with your homemade projects is it's um a lot of them don't always last that long yeah either you get bored with them and then they break and then you forgot how they work and then you've got to try and other figure it out and you think no i'll just make a new one in a different way because i've learned something else that i want to try or something it's like i've got one really really long live project which always astonishes me when it keeps working which is from a book i did probably like sort of uh 10 or 12 years ago or something one of my first books and it's an rfid um garage lock for the garage door just just for the side garage door yeah and we since lost the keys to garage door because we had the builders in and they threw away a load of old keys that was because it was attached to the old indoor door or something i don't know anyway we haven't got any way of getting into this room now apart from using this rfid project that i did 12 years ago and every time i go to the garage with the rfid key i think at some point i'm just not going to be able to get into the garage anymore we just had to move [Laughter] so talking about books you have a new book out i believe a raspberry pi pico book yes thank you for mentioning it yeah um yes let me let me hold it up to the screen can you see that yes yes okay yeah so um yeah this is a departure from me because um we're doing it as a self-published uh thing well actually by our company among mates and we're sort of trying to sort of we'll probably might do a few more books on that um so we paid for proper editorial support for it and layout and everything so it has a sort of professional quality um but we're actually publishing it directly on amazon but we'll also sell it as a product uh yeah through things so it focuses on it's a python basically python on the on the pico there is a one chapter that talks a little bit about um using the arduino ide and also using circuit python which is an alternative flavor of python that you can use with the with the pico um yeah so i really enjoyed that as i said i'm quite a big fan of the pico i think it's a it's a great little board yeah and um from point of view it's natural home for me is in a piece of breadboard i noticed you had yours in a breadboard didn't you and i think i think most people's picots will permanently live in breadboard hence we get because it's the easy way to connect it up you can just and plug in components around it and then you can connect things together with jumper wires and it's just a really nice little learning platform yeah so we actually have um this the the book actually makes use of quite a lot of things in the pico we have an electronic starter kit for pico uh product which is a breadboard-based product it uses a custom breadboard that's got the labels on for all the pico pins and it has some through-hole components some sort of leds uh temperature sensor and various other things that you can then plug in onto the breadboard and then make a few different projects yeah with it so yeah that is um yeah i enjoyed writing that it's quite fun yeah it's always that's the nice thing about writing you you sort of have to get to the bottom of a new technology and then how it all works and yeah and it'd be able to explain it to somebody else which is always a good test of whether you actually understand absolutely yes yeah i think that's one of the the tests isn't it if you fully understand something or not if you can teach somebody else that thing yeah i think it ever there's a feinman quote originally isn't there something like it you don't really understand something unless you can explain it to a 12 year old correct that's it yeah so how long does it take you to write a book typically then i mean i guess it depends on how big the book is but yeah and how much else is going on really when i was just writing i i would generally have a couple of books on the go at the same time so if i got a bit fed up with one of them i could switch over and do some work on the other one and i would generally uh you know at some points i was doing stuff six books a year or something like that really it's i again coming from a software background um i did spend quite a lot of time in agile software development teams and a good way i i actually find doing a sort of um i create myself a spreadsheet and i put in estimated effort for each chapter and how many pages i think is going to be in the chapter and then the spreadsheet basically tells me how many pages a day i've got to write in order to meet the book deadline and so so if it says two pages a day that's it i'm laughing that's fine that's no problem and it gets up to eight pages a day that's it i'm trying to renegotiate the deadline because that's not going to happen but it does keep you on track so that you can just uh treat it so i treat it like a software project yeah which is a you know it does mean that um you can generally hit deadlines or at least know well ahead of time that you're not going to hit a deadline which is if you're writing for a publisher they need that because things go into catalogues and the salesforce gets told about them and they really don't like it when you start changing deadlines because i've found one of the challenges with um like creating robots if i try and create one in a week for example if i hit an issue with the software or something's not quite working the way that it's supposed to do or i've not quite understood something and it works exactly the way it does i just haven't understood that yet it can just take a bit of more time than i expect to to figure that out however having gone through that i then know the exact kind of pain points that other people go through and that's a real value isn't it i would always say that the best time to write a book about something or explain about something is just after you've learned how to do it yeah because you can remember the things that tripped you up you can remember the things that you know that are likely to trip other people up and it's um it's a good time to do it and also everything's kind of fresh in your mind you sort of know the things you didn't know um if that makes sense yes absolutely yeah i mean i always say that when i uh i'm a contractor so i'll work for different organizations as a project manager and uh i always think the first two weeks you kind of you see the company as it is and you can make some really good observations after that time you probably got native and you know you're not aware of what you knew at that point so yeah it's really good to capture it at the moment i think so that's one of the reasons i started this channel actually it was to kind of document a bit like you said about your book with the uh the evil genius one kind of document my own journey as i learn more things about robots and um so i could go back and go how did i do that oh i did that video on it i can now look and see what i i understood about that yes yeah out keeping a lab book keeping a workbook is a really good idea and just writing down everything you try it particularly when you're sort of debugging something yeah or you're you know you've got the first version of a board and one of the things i quite often want to do is do a proper sort of electrical test on it you know particularly for our microbiota products you know what happens if they plug it in the wrong way around i i don't you know will this be protected you know if they do something staffed with the wiring because you don't want a lot of support problems that people just accidentally destroying their boards so if you can head it off fairly easily whichever you can yeah but i mean i like as a top tip for a sort of a notebook look for something with squared paper i like quite a big sort of a4 size but with square paper and it's actually quite hard to find them for some reason um that seems to be we go to spain very regularly and that seems to be if you go in the supermarkets there and look for a notebook you won't you'll generally find one of them you know a squared notebook just as easy as you will find a line that notebook whereas if you go into a supermarket here you will only find like lined notebooks you won't find anything with squares and so i'm not quite sure where you buy them but i've got a stock of them because they always buy a few when i see the opportunity so i'm just scrabbling to find one of my notebooks so i backgrounds with dotted paper um because yeah so it's not quite as distracting as the squares but you can use them as squares so i'm designing some faces on that particular one and so i have like a lab book of things i have the same type for work as well these are i think that's a leuchtturm is that you pronounce it it's like a posh notebook really all right lecture term sorry it's like a german name um focus on there yeah so i don't like yeah if you're drawing circuit schematics and things like that you either want faint squares or you want nothing at all so that's the other thing i've used is just a notebook with no lines or anything in it at all because just a load of horizontal lines just makes it you know difficult to follow yeah and i know how to write in a straight line anyway well more or less so i don't need lines i'm not 12. so i love these sort of uh a5 size books um these are all either moleskine or the electrum or whatever it's called yeah yeah interesting interesting most creators have that as well so all the other people i've sort of spoke to and interviewed they have their own notebook as well so it's interesting even in this age of digital nice soft propelling pencil a really good self-propelling pencil there's a i can't remember where it is there's a japanese make that every time you um press the nib down yeah there's a little gearing thing in it that rotates the nib slightly yeah only and it does it like 20 revolutions or something so it does actually mean that you're never writing with the sharp bit of the nib or anything yeah it's a very geeky thing but i do like a good like i love a good propelling pencil me yep that's it you kind of get these creature comforts like i mean these are not cheap they're about 17 pounds each i think there's a notebook but the quality of the paper on it yeah it's got a real you know you can write with a sharpie and it doesn't bleed through um they're really good quality but a bit expensive but yeah don't go through too many of them i do prefer working on them i just find you can really zone out everything else and just focus on the thing that you're trying to create so yeah that's very true yeah yeah excellent so i think we're pretty much done actually i think we're with uh how long have we been going there an hour and 25 minutes that's flown by it's been very nice very interesting so thank you very much for your time i really appreciate that simon and all the best with the new book i'll certainly be getting a copy myself and i'll be also checking out monk makes and looking at some of the other kits you've got on there as well because uh they're always good to to have in the background particularly things like the the pin numbers on the the breadboard i'll be seeking that one out i think as well for myself because that's always yeah i'll send you one heaven that's very good i've got posters on my wall of um all the different boards that i use because um the number of times where i need to refer back to the pin numbers and stuff i thought might as well just print them out and have them as a as a you know a nice big poster so yeah yeah something people can download from my uh buy me a coffee website as well i have a support website there so yes um anything else you'd like to say to the world why you have the the floor oh no i don't think so really um it's just very nice talking to you yeah and uh yeah we're going to do it again some other time absolutely yes thank you very much simon kevin i shall see you later all right all the best bye

Channel: Kevin McAleer

Views: 198

Keywords: Meet The Maker, Simon Monk, monkmakes, Arduino projects for the evil genius, Pico, Raspberry Pi Pico, raspberry pi pico, micropython, Interview, Kevin McAleer, Small Robots, Robots, Robotics, Stem, Education, Opensource, MicroBit, micro bit, micro:bit, BBC micro:bit, raspberry pi, raspberry pi projects, micropython pico, micropython for beginners, simon monk arduino, 30 arduino projects for the evil genius, simon monk books

Id: Jy02ApzvyDM

Length: 85min 55sec (5155 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 17 2021