The Amp Hour

An Interview with Kerry Scharfglass

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Welcome, Kerry Scharfglass (@borgel)!

This episode is sponsored by Screaming Circuits, who are operating throughout the COVID-19 shutdown to serve medical customers (and normal customers too!). If you need priority service for a medical device related to Coronavirus, please let them know upon checkout. All other orders will be on a non-standard timeline guarantee (because of staffing, priority orders), but will have the same high quality assembly that Screaming Circuits is known for.

  • Kerry was using Upverter for layout and switched to KiCad.
  • He was designing a badge for DEF CON, which he did multiple years.
  • The Dragonfly Badge was based upon Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age
  • Synchronizing clock over IR helped each piece of hardware coordinate patterns.
  • Kerry has done two HDDG talks:
    • From 1 to 100: Scaling and Selling a Personal Electronics Project'
    • Design for Manufacturing
    • There was another talk by Whitney Merrill about Badgelife that helped Chris understand people were building real hardware.
    • Kerry Supercon talk about "medium scale"
    • SnapEDA
    • Talk with Nadya, Ben, and Zach
    • Things learned from 'small scale hardware war games'
    • Photos of units, colorful diagrams
    • "All the different things you use profit for"
    • Moving from 4 layer to 6 layer
    • Kerry's first job out of school was at Lab126, the company that makes hardware for Amazon.
    • At the time, they had released the Kindle and KindleFire.
    • He was working on a prototype for what became the Echo.
    • A (wearable) ring for Echo
    • Wallwart that is cheap enough to throw into everything
    • OMAP3 with DSP core
    • Tracking COVID cases using phones
    • Wake word on device
    • Initial integration with Hue worked over UPnP
    • Built with Yocto
    • After Lab126, Kerry started working at Mindtribe. They were recently acquired by Accenture.
    • Dockless scooter
    • Speed to market as a design constraint
    • How did it impact the firmware side of things?
    • "If you can't communicate with the client about what you're doing, it doesn't matter what you're building at all"
    • Whiteboarding as a skill in front of clients
    • Mercilessly hack away at requirements
    • Chris has dealt in the past with consultants who are rude (and doesn't want to be like that).
    • Kerry is now the Lead firmware engineer at Span.io. They are making power panels that can work better with solar and battery systems.
    • Things that are different as a full time engineer vs a consultant: "I have all of the skin in the game instead of some of the skin"
    • Moving into management vs moving to smaller company
    • Storage + Solar
    • The Powerwall doesn't show up as a full system, it needs to be integrated by an electrician or similar.
    • Industry is different than commercial
    • "Designing for service"
    • One customer is the home owner, one is the installer
    • EEVblog videos about solar
    • Changing wifi connection by the installer
    • Altium to KiCad converter
    • Hackaday articles
      • Inner workings of a PCB
      • Embedded file systems (LittleFS)
      • Check out more about Span.io
        • ...more
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        The Amp HourBy The Amp Hour (Chris Gammell and David L Jones)
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