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.
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.