The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast

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