Chris Gammell and Dave Jones' voices span the chasm of thousands of miles each and every week to speak to each other and industry experts about where the field of electronics is moving. Whether it be a late breaking story about a large semiconductor manufacturer, a new piece of must-have test equipment or just talking through recent issues with their circuit designs, Chris and Dave try to make electronics more accessible for the listeners. Most importantly, they try and make the field of electronics more fun. Guests range from advanced hobbyists working on exciting new projects up through C-level executives at a variety of relevant and innovative companies. Tune in to learn more about electronics and then join the conversation! Visit The Amp Hour website for our back catalog of 150+ episodes.
https://theamphour.com
#537 – Firmware Deployment and Troubleshooting with Akbar Dhanaliwala
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