The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast

Listen to your hosts Dave Jones & Chris Gammell talk about electronics design and the electronics industry in general. If you have any interest in electronics at all, from hobbyist/hacker/maker to engineering professional you'll find something of interest here.

https://theamphour.com

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#461 – An Interview with Jonathan Georgino


Welcome, Jonathan Georgino of Binho!

  • The Binho is a USB host adapter targeted at manufacturing floors, but also can help people quickly talk to devices using i2c, serial, SPI and GPIO.
  • There are a couple of options out there for manufacturing: Some are robust and expensive, others are hobbyist
  • Using scripts and adapters for production line programming
  • Career started at GE in St Marys, working on a CAN sensors
  • Got a Saleae logic analyzer, wrote to Mark and Joe, went to go work with them.
  • Mark and Joe were on episode 237 of The Amp Hour
  • Helped to design the Logic 8, 8 pro and 16.
  • Jonathan took away that products should be a pleasure to use, easy to understand
  • Making it accessible in multiple ways
  • Mark recently talked to Limor about the Saleae
  • After Saleae, Jonathan went to go work at the Wonder Workshop (WW)
  • Other consumer Robot startups having a hard time. We talked about Anki on episode 441.
  • WW focuses on the educational market, where you need to be prepared for 1 year sales cycle and need a curriculum for the teachers who will be using it.
  • Blockly or Scratch to program the robots
  • Variables are tough for kids to understand (or big kids, like Chris).
  • When designing for the educational market, need to design for robustness and compliance testing
  • Testing comes out of the IEC standards, with different ones for each country.
  • Partnered with toy manufacturer in China to make the robots.
  • Jonathan was only EE up until production
  • Dash has 12 different PCBs, with one that has 3 processors and 2 SPI flashes on board.
  • Blockly is an open source project from Google
  • “Changing careers is the best way to learn and grow”
  • After WW, Jonathan moved to Zola, who are doing off grid for African countries.
  • He got to visit Tanzania and see the product in action. There wasn’t as much needed on the EE side of things.
  • Then he joined Pi, now Spansive
  • They were working on a wireless charging device using A4WP, banking on new phones adapting it as a standard (it wasn’t)
  • The experience in China manufacturing was that there are devices available but they are low cost and have janky UI.
  • Most popular on the market are from Total Phase
  • Can connect to Binho using Python API or any application that can pass in ASCII characters
  • Can hook into any of the existing tools
  • Some people are using a Raspberry Pi for testing
  • Under the hood it’s an m0, with protection for overcurrent
  • Also have a GUI
  • Built in Xojo to be cross platform
  • Use pip to install binho host adapter
  • Jonathan advises you to put your pins onto the board the first time your board is made
  • Continuous integration for firmware
  • Rigol has python libraries, as does the Saleae. These might be python on top of GPIB.
  • Check out Jonathan’s personal site and the Binho site.


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 October 7, 2019  59m