April 22, 2016

An Interview with Omer Kilic

1 hour 18 minutes

Welcome, Omer Kilic (@OmerK)

Omer has an academic background. His thesis started off being about FPGAs.Towards the tail-end of his research, he started exploring Erlang for embedded devices.

He programs using Erlang, which was created by former mobile phone giant Ericksson (device making has tailed off, they still do network infrastructure).

They had a phone called the T28 that was well designed.

Erlang can uses the "actor model" of concurrency, which maps really well into the hardware domain. It's used for the backend of apps like WhatsApp. More info at http://www.erlang-embedded.com/

Chris had spend the day at the London Science Museum. It was fantastic!

Omer has worked with a few hardware companies in the past, including doing work on large manufacturing operations in China.

Now Omer is the CTO and Chief Hacker at Den Automation.

Nothing replaces being able to sit next to each other during development.

While in China last time, Omer tried talking to big semi with mixed results. It was easier to get a few chips in the market as an experiment.

Omer has talked about access to chips in the past at OSHUG.

The main problem with intelligent devices is interoperability. How do you get multiple devices to talk to one another without loads of software?

Setting standards aren't the answer, there was a relevant XKCD about that very topic.

Usually it's companies saying "use ours!" and this only rarely actually works out in the end (like Motorola with SPI)

The National Microelectronics Institute (NMI) will host a talk in May, falongside BCS (British Computing Society) and OSHUG. The event is called the NMI Open Source Conference.

Open source can be something people hide behind and use as an excuse for mediocrity in their products.

The company was started by Yasser, now only 20ish years old! They raised 500K of seed funding

We put a chip in it!

The Internet of Shit is a great novelty account. They recently tweeted about the stats of people planning to use Javascript in their devices.

The Den Automation devices will be a connected wall switch and socket, along with a couple of auxiliary helper devices. Sockets in the UK have switches on them as well. At first they will only be making UK based devices.

Each socket/plug will have power consumption monitoring and also will allow the user to "label" which device is plugged into it.

The problem is that they are building the entire socket/switch from scratch. This means lots of regulatory hurdles. The British standards must be passed, as well as CE for RF.

The problem with dynamic languages (like Javascript) is the overhead required if it is to be run on each device.

Den already is utilizing a PLM because of the impending regulation process.

The decision to move production to China should not be taken lightly. There was a Wired UK series on production there.

The initial funding for the project was raised on Seedrs, they are are raising a second round now.

See more about the project at http://getden.co.uk/

Omer has given another talk about IOT called "The IOT Hardware Kerfuffle"

Many thanks to Omer for talking about the connected device market and doing manufacturing with a small team! It turned into a constructive conversation about getting products to market.

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By The Amp Hour (Chris Gammell and David L Jones)

4.9

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