The Amp Hour

Firmware Deployment and Troubleshooting with Akbar Dhanaliwala

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Welcome Akbar Dhanaliwala, Founder and CEO of Lager Data!

  • Akbar has been doing 15 years of embedded systems
  • He has a Mech E background and attended Stanford engineering for grad school.
  • Solar panel robot cleaner
  • They had evisioned a device that enabled wireless debug with JLink
  • JLink with RPi
  • Dev Ops
  • War stories
  • Various types of testing
  • Consulting right after school via his consultancy Pocobor
  • One of their first customers was Solar City (later purchased by Tesla).
  • Wireless system using ZigBee to monitor panels and inverters. The bridge in the inverter, the gateway is in the house. Some are still deployed in the field.
  • They were the "low bid", which means they didn't work for much as consultants (but it lead to many other gigs)
  • Testing Zigbee by walking down the block
  • Pocobor - It's "Robocop spelled backwards"
  • Another company was Juul when they were still called Plume
  • They had an office in Dogpatch (in SF)
  • Being a technology center, it lead to many interesting gigs
  • Stanford Junior car (VW)
    • Testing big stuff
    • Why did Pocobor end?
    • Minna was a spinoff in the sex toy industry in 2009. They are still around.
    • Akbar moved to NYC and joined a startup called Ringly with a friend who started the company
    • They got the product to market, a device that indicates when you have new messages on your phone without looking at a screen
    • Required a complex flex board interally because it was such a small, odd form factor in a ring.
    • Burned out after a lot of time in China
    • Step tracking in the ring using algorithm development (difficult because the hand does a lot of other movements than just walking)
    • Getting data out was really hard because you couldn't just plug in a JLink
    • No automation or regression testing
    • Updates could break OTA DFU
    • ANCS protocol
    • All of his experiences inspired Lager Data
    • CI/CD
    • Runs the test when you push the code
    • IDE dependent tools
    • Gateway
    • Debug probe built in
    • Wrapper tools
    • Lager command line makes it easier to script actions
    • Dockerized build environments
    • Gateway has IO you can access via the command line
    • Unity test framework
    • Quaternions
    • Writing test data
    • Lager gdb server
    • 3rd party build
    • GitHub actions
    • TDD - test driven development
    • System test
    • Run python scripts on gateway
    • Past guest Jason Huggins (Tapster) also talked about the importance of testing
    • Akbar recommends implementing a simple shell in embedded projects
    • Testing over UART
    • For more info or to sign for for a demo, check out lagerdata.com
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      The Amp HourBy The Amp Hour (Chris Gammell and David L Jones)
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