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Hello and welcome, the following
session is about the blinking rockets,
the nifty device that some of you might
already know, it's a 100
percent open source.
Do it yourself soldering kit that offers
the best hands on experience for
beginners of all ages.
Overflowing with see.
Here to tell us all about their journey
in making the blinking rocket fly.
Let's hear some applause from four
overflowing with.
So, oh, well, I can hear my voice,
so we're waiting for the lights to
appear.
And why are we waiting for the lights to
appear a warm welcome from my side as
well?
I would see this as a by the river.
I introduce ourselves later on again.
So let's well spend
some time waiting for the slides to
appear.
And also a warm welcome to those who are
in the streams.
At least I got one hint that somebody
is on the tram right now, so they
probably have good connectivity
to watch this talk as well.
So you're going to walk with us through
the journey of playing Rockridge, which
is this little thing that I have here
on this band and we're going to talk
you through various topics.
So we're going to start with our project
goals because you want to have goals
before we start something.
Just like with any project we have,
then I'm going to talk it through this
little hardware.
What we have on there, the design
considerations behind that and
probably most interesting, the software
running on this little device.
And after all, we're going to talk you
through how to actually productize
a do it yourself solving kit because
we know that there are plenty of ideas
here in that room.
And if you want to distribute your own
Do-It-Yourself sort of kit, well, you
can learn probably a lot from what we've
went through and what you've learned
and also what you can do right in the
first place without actually failing
one, three or four times.
So shortly about us.
This here on the left side is floor.
He's a dad of three and a member
of the metal lab, and he's
the guy behind the hackerspace shop.
That's an online shop for various
Do-It-Yourself kits.
You created plenty of Do-It-Yourself kits
in the past, so he's like more
experienced than I am and I'm
with at daytime.
I do big data topics and at
nighttime, once the sun sets while
I'm creating Do-It-Yourself kits for
kids.
So at this point in time,
I want to thank all the contributors
that helped us making this little
thing possible. So a big shout out and
thank you, your awesome guys.
Yeah, and you can give them a round of
applause.
So let's start with particulates.
If you see this little kit and you have
probably seen it already today because
at your catalog, there are plenty of
children actually solving this.
So we have a target audience.
So first of all, if you create something,
you have to think about who uses it
or who is the well intentioned
audience behind that.
So we have children, youth and adults
basically as our audience.
And when they solve this, they're
probably at home or in workshops,
in schools, universities or even
spaces.
While most of us here come from park
spaces, so that's kind of obvious
and we have some requirements
derived by that.
First of all, I hate it when I
have to use a special program to program
my devices.
If I have something great, I just
assemble it and then I need to assemble
something to just program it.
That's awful.
And also, I hate it when I have to buy
something because I forgot to buy it.
Like with a little Arduino thing
in the past, you have to have this use
two serial converter, and I
almost never thought about that.
So that was kind of bad.
Also, given the target audience
children, well, they don't feel
small tots, but adults do.
So we try to choose
big parts and they're even like
little small assembly parts here,
and they can be big too.
So we made the footprints lighter
and bigger so that if you sold them, they
will flow nicely and you can't do
it wrong virtually.
And we wanted to have cheap components
so that if you buy a kit,
you do not have to spend too much money.
And ideally, it should be free anyway
because we do not care about your income
and everything should be free when it
comes to learning stuff.
Also, the most important aspect you
make something it should be, well,
useful in the first place.
It should be fun and also educational,
especially if you're targeting children.
They should learn something.
And with this kids, they can learn how to
get older. They will see that
something in the digital world can be
translated to the real world.
So that was our main aspect.
And it's, well, kind of fun to have
something that links your name or has
nice little animations on there.
So based on these considerations,
the bleating of our kids was born about
two years ago, and
on the front side you see the eight by
eight Pixel Dot matrix display,
then the audio jack for uploading
data. And that's like one thing
that addresses this.
No programmer needed aspect
because we wanted to have the ability
to use your mobile basically to
upload new texts or animation
to that little device.
So this is kind of special to
that Do-It-Yourself soldering kit.
Also, not interacting
with something is kind of boring.
So we have do little to push buttons
so that can move between the animations
and texts that are scrolled through the
display on the back.
We have, of course, a coin cell
that powers the whole device,
and it lasts about a day or two is so
don't worry about new batteries.
Also, we have a little tiny
microcontroller, which was the cheapest
microcontroller back in the day
with that much pins to drive the display
directly.
And also, we have storage
with 64k of storage available
for your animations.
And that's roughly 20 to three
thousand characters of text, and
they can be a little hard to read on that
little display, so it could be sufficient
for all time.
And also some additional little assembly
components.
Well, to sort of everything
on the software side of things,
everything is Open-Source.
Like this awesome herald already
mentioned?
We want to make everything Open-Source.
And when we talk about everything, it's
not first source code or the
PCB layout.
We also made our documentation open
source and license it the proper way
we made our manual that's actually
printed and handed in to every kid.
Also, open source and not only
the PDF, we also the source files
that you can assemble it on your own or
we mix it based on your needs.
The Femara was written in modular C++.
I don't think it matters too much,
actually, but I think it's worth
mentioning, though.
Also, we have a web editor for putting
little animations and text on this device
so you can use it on any device,
whether it be your mobile phone or your
computer, everything with a web browser
and audio.
While the device is capable of programing
the blink of ARKit and it's written into
our script. Of course, if it's a web
application and the
one initially created, it used the
awesome React Fast framework
because it made things a little easier.
The audio transmission itself is
using screen waves, so little square
signals coming out your audio device
and you have a protocol using forward
error correction so that if there is a
mistake within the transmission, it
will be fixed automatically.
So after a while, we created a
thousand rockets, so a thousand
kits to be distributed among children,
youth and adults.
They were manufactured by lots of
volunteers in mid two thousand
sixteen.
After roughly half a year of development
time in our spare time, it
was initially funded by the CCC.
I'm not too sure who knows the car's
muscular initiative, but
see if you could raise your hands.
Well, it's like the whole crowd, so
if you don't know it, go ask your
neighbor. After this, talk about this
awesome initiative is
so it was funded to be part
of these workshops taking place in the
cosmos through the initiative.
It was packaged by volunteers
at the taxpayers hackerspace
in God.
So it took like roughly a day for 10
people to assemble a thousand kits,
and it was distributed across all
Europe for workshops.
And here are some impressions of
workshops taking place.
They were all awesome.
The kids had plenty of fun to assemble
the blatant rockets, and in the
moment they split the battery in and
everything started to blink.
It was just awesome to see their faces
and we'll see all that enjoyment
in their face.
But there was a big catch and this is
where I head over to floor because
we learned a lot and he's going to tell
us about what we've learned.
Yes, hello.
Is this on? Do you hear me?
I'm not sure if I'm on or not.
Okay. Hello.
So yes, there was a little
catch and we learned a lot.
So the first thing when I got my hands
on the first big rocket kit,
I realized it was a really good one and
there was potential to make this bigger
and distribute it to more kids.
But the first thing the first
problem that occurred to me
was that we use square
waves to transmit the data on the Lenovo
ThinkPad, for example. That worked out
just fine.
But the similar factory for another
notebook, it didn't work at all.
As you can see here.
The data was totally distorted,
and we could not process that signal, so
transmission from the web browser to the
rocket wouldn't look reliable.
Some common errors that happened were
that the signal would drift all the time,
like the first picture on the left,
you see a yellow curve, and that's the
signal that you get out of a sound card
and the blue signal.
The blue curve is what the computer
would make out of that.
And by the voltage drifting
upside stunted on the
on the y axis, you see that
that's the signal.
It's really hard to process, and it just
wouldn't work out reliably
and also on the right to say to have the
heavily distorted signal.
But why? Why is that happening?
Well, every sound device
works a little different.
We have different manufacturers of sound
chips, we have different sound cards
and they they all do
similar things, but not exactly the very
same thing.
And most sound cards are troubled by
square waves. So if you make a square
wave signal, it goes like this.
Sound cards cannot reliably
produce that.
Some of them, most of them,
and also those various layers between
the web browser and the actual
sound card.
For example, you tend to read the sound
object in the web browser, and
it's given to the ALSA driver, and
that gives it to some hardware
abstraction layer.
And that gives it the kernel, and that's
another over to the actual hardware.
And in all the steps in between,
the signal can be modified and is
modified, especially at the hardware
level.
The signal is modified,
so it sounds good to the human ear,
but it's not really meant to submit data.
So this who
came up with a solution to
this problem by introducing ADC
analog digital converter edge detection,
which means he sampled the signal
a lot.
Sometimes, yeah, sometimes.
And it worked.
Much more reliable than the old
way of simply detecting the edges of the
square signal.
But still, there were some issues.
It didn't work 100 percent,
and he spent some more time digging into
this problem, and he came up
with the solution of frequency shifting
and that worked really good.
Frequency shifting means that you make
not squares, but sine waves you consider
the form is like it doesn't go
like this, but more.
It's more coffee
to say and that's what's on can't
usually do to provide base.
And that kind of
other transmission worked out much more
reliable.
It's also much slower, but
that's OK. You're talking about some
seconds to transmit the data instead
of some milliseconds, so that's totally
acceptable. If you plug it in, it'll take
you out of the two seconds and then you
have the animation on the rocket
once it was fixed.
I started to take a look at the hardware
level, how the kid could be improved.
And one thing that we found out during
the workshops was that the battery holder
was not the best choice because people
would put in the batteries in various
ways that were not intended.
So this is what the original battery
holder looked like, and you could insert
the battery like this, which is actually
wrong. It looks right, but it's not
because a part of it is spent, and
it's also the other way of inserting it.
That happened a lot, and
in this way, the rocket wouldn't work.
So yeah,
I got rid of the battery holder and
introduced this one.
It has some benefits.
It's a little it's a little more
expensive than the other one, but the
battery slides in from the top, and
there is just one way to insert the
battery the wrong way.
And that doesn't happen too often.
Well, if the other battery holder there
were eight possibilities to insert the
battery in a wrong way, so
that took off took away a lot of
problems.
Yeah, then
the original matrix module that was
included was also very cheap.
But I thought that if you make a kit that
you would take around your neck, it would
look nice.
It wouldn't be 10 cents cheaper, but
it's worth to to add a little extra and
have a good look. So we introduced this
new matrix module to the square
dots and a few slides, and it just
looks better.
And then I revised the PDP
design a lot, and I got a lot
of little.
I just shuffled around the components and
a penalized the sun for production,
which means that I
took one rocket and put it on a panel
like this. We have 14 rockets
and you can fit this into a pick and
place machine to automatically produce
the boards.
So why is that?
Because people put versions of
targeting different users.
The kit, then I got it for the first
time.
It was rather complex and you had
to solve the.
Sue, and you from yourself, and I'm
now offering three different versions,
one where you sold the oldest of yourself
for experienced users
and one of a diplomat who is
already in place for targeting kids.
And one version of all this and the
components are already on the board and
it just sort of it to the six
four whole components yourself, which
targets very young people
like my my daughter made one and she's
six years old.
So this is one version too was born.
So you see the new Matrix model there.
You see the battery holder and the
components, more foreign aid,
and then they're all designed to make it
easier to shoulder.
And that's the thing.
If you make one bolt,
it's quite easy you can make to the sun
you ordered from China, get to 10 copies
in the news and build it the day before.
Make it thousands of something you
run into various challenges and problems.
So, for example,
for the first production run, the
original kits that were made in 2016,
everything was done by hand.
So in order to build this programing
based programing fixture before syringe
texture force socket, you placed the
microcontroller inside and have a little
script that flashes the microcontroller
before the actual firmware.
And they can tell the kids means opening
the socket, inserting to closing
the socket, hitting the button 1000
times.
How long did that take you?
Well, roughly a day of just
removing a single chip
out of a packet or putting it
in. Closing the lid,
pressing a button, opening the lid,
well, moving everything out into a little
plastic bag.
And these were kind of nasty because they
were like Ziploc bags
and while they were hot to open.
So I spend roughly eight hours flashing
a thousand microcontrollers, which was
awful.
Believe me,
it's not fun if you ever make a kit.
This is something you don't want to do.
It's just don't do it.
Don't do this.
There are alternatives, solitary laser
and turn that you can see on the right
components were put on labels.
So the kit consists of the of
the actual M2 and PRISM and eight
different other components like
resistors, capacitors and diodes,
and have different values.
So what they did in the first production
run is they took little stickers, little
labels and cut all the
components up and put them into the
correct position on the sticky notes and
put them in the kit.
It parts themselves thousand kids.
It's a thousand cuts being
there with kissers, eight times cutting
up parts. You need a lot of people or a
lot of time or both.
How long did that take?
Well, we had roughly 10 people helping
out. Thankfully otherwise, I
would spend like weeks or months doing
it, and we spend roughly a day
with 10 people to create a thousand
kits. And that includes also like cutting
down parts.
And people were really eager to help.
So I was really thankful.
But this wasn't feasible for the next
thousand kids.
Absolutely not.
Yeah, it's it's not fun.
It's not a fun activity.
Even building kits, this part should
be done by machines.
That's what they're for.
So when I
kind of took over the production of the
kids,
I figured I should save time by using
machines, even if it
cost a little extra. It's probably of all
the time and money, and I should
get preprogramed MSU's.
You can pay a little extra some sense
and to get the MCU with the program
in it from the manufacturer because like
10 or 15 cents, something around that and
it's totally off to floor
and I introduce color coding of assembly
parts in the old kit layout.
You had the label, it said R1, and then
you put the part right there in the new
kit. You have a part that is labeled.
There is no text on it, but it's a red
part or green part or a blue part.
And you get the little card that says put
the red part on R1 and the blue part
there that took away a lot of time when
assembling the kits and finally
introduced a new package.
It now comes in a little plastic package
that you can use for transportation.
And also during assembly, it's
very handy.
So, yeah, I mentioned robots before
when I was first off the job of making
a thousand kids.
I thought that I would not be able to
cut this parts up ourselves, and I should
take a machine for that and let
the printer would take over.
And that's what it did.
I'm going to show you what we do know.
There you see how that worked out.
They are a little fast forward there.
Yeah, so I called this machine, that's a
hacker.
It's.
Yeah, that's a haka.
It took me took me some time to build it,
I thought, yeah, I'd take some scissors
and the motor and still work
before iterations.
What it does is it cuts as parts
from the drill.
It also Cullercoats the parts while
cutting them. So there's a little
market, as you can see here, that puts a
strip a color on the strip
before cutting it up, so I could just
replace that for each part.
So they are color coded.
And I have two buttons where I can adjust
how many holes I want to move forward
before cutting it up because I have some
parts for only three pieces in the kit
that if I just purchased it one
and cut a lot faster.
It's really fast to cut up two thousand
parts in our which saved me
days of work to make this kid.
It was totally worth the effort, but
it took me four iterations to get the
machine right.
The main point I learned is that scissors
are a spare part to beat must be
replaceable. You don't want to build a
machine that has some kind of mechanic to
cut off parts that is not replaceable.
So I used to pass code and
mail order 3D printed designs to hold
the pieces in place.
And you see here ball bearings
from roller blades that that push down
the skitters.
And
there's one part it's called a pocket as
pocket is like a little blue
that has spikes, and that's
something I actually bought in China for
$15 and that
gets in there, and it's used in
commercial pick and place machines to
move forward to the tape.
So PC fabrication, once I had
all these parts cut up
and the firmware issues fixed,
it was time to go to the polls and have
the PC piece manufactured because I got
the panels that we showed you earlier
from China and I wanted
the parts on there and I made a little
video of how the process works.
It was really fun to be there and it
was. It was a very nice afternoon
to watch all these huge robots doing the
work. So I will show you a little how
it turned out.
So here is panels, and this is when the
solar paste is applied
to solar paste is now under pedals.
And then they go into the pick and place
machine, which is configured before.
And this is really computer chips are the
robot really looks in real time.
It moves quite fast.
It can support adjusted to fit its
position needs adjustment.
It goes into the open and once it comes
out of the open and though it blinks, you
just have to assemble the whole
components yourself and then you're done.
So
yeah, and what
caught me by surprise was the cost
structure to make this kit.
I did not expect that the cost
would be this I'm
able to see now
you have assembly tooling and supply
chain cost of about over 50 percent
of the actual kit costs
and 50 percent is material.
So even if you use machines
to make a kit,
it takes time.
And in this case, it took more time than
I expected. So
I'm currently selling those kits at my
shop for twenty five euros each and
do buy basically two kits and one is
given into a little box.
And if you make a workshop with kits at a
school where they don't pay for it, I
take the kit out of there and give it
to the to the kids for free.
And you might get a little email, a lot
of pictures of the birds who can actually
see what happens if you're a donation.
Yeah. So that was my part of the talk.
I will hand over to music on
this.
So I think we learned a valuable lesson
about the cost structure because
that will affect all of you creating such
DIY kits because
the costs might not be obvious if
you browse through with shops
and see that, like your microcontroller,
cost less than euro.
But then all the other costs can add up
to, well, what we've seen there.
So it can be surprising and you
should be aware of that.
So we all ask ourselves right now, what's
next? And I had a look in the
audience. My fellow was talking and I've
seen plenty of paint and rockets, so
that's already a good sign.
So what's next?
Today there are souleyman workshops for
children here
on the Congress.
So if you're, I'm not
sure about the age, but if your children
go there, have fun and get
your blank rocket, there
will be more workshops because the first
kits were distributed
well in 2016 and fluid
to create another thousand kits, so
they will be more to be distributed for
those workshops.
There will be Utrecht workshops
in Austria next year, so
if you're from Austria or living nearby,
then you might want to consider going
there or well,
if you are not an adult, of course,
and solely your own custom building
rocket. But even if you're an adult,
that's not a. Problem because you could
create a workshop in your community, so
if you like to have a nice playing rock,
a solo workshop, don't hesitate
to ask us.
We have all the material required to
create your own workshop.
We have guidance.
We have manuals.
We have best practices.
So just ask us and we will try our best
to make your workshop a success.
And also, you, as Floor told us,
you can buy a kit in his shop
and there is automatically one kit being
donated to your children workshop
because we do believe that if
a child does attend a workshop, there
should be no fee attached to that
because, well, we want to treat everybody
equal and money should not be a thing
there. So if you buy one there,
of course, it will go to
one free workshop for a kid.
So I think that's a good thing
if you got some time to spare.
And I think
everybody does that, especially if you
are in your local headspace, you could
plan a local workshop.
So please do so
if you're a web developer willing to
spend some time to improve
everything.
Well, there's a GitHub repository
with all the code in there.
You can create a fork.
You could work on the issues to make
everything even better.
Like, for instance, better support for
animations or better editing
tools.
Or create a share button for sharing
animations with your friends.
Or you could just spread the word.
Everything is open source, so we want to
encourage you guys to
actually use what we've created
to create your own stuff, so
please be welcome to do so.
This is the reason for making everything
open source, and we would kindly ask you
to do the same with
your stuff.
This is our talk already.
Are There follows a Q&A session
right now.
If you want to ask in if you're not
so familiar with English, don't worry,
we will translate everything to English
first and then answer it in English,
and there will be the other translation
angels. Translating it to ferryman
on the right channel.
If you want to contact us after the talk,
there is an email address.
There is a Twitter handle and there's
also a decked phone number.
It was seven
seven eight eight five four five
seven eight eight five.
Look at all the come to the stage right
after the talk, so we can have a
chat and we can show you everything
in detail and we'll
help you out. So thanks a lot.
Thank you
very much.
And the plus from speakers.
We have four microphones set up in this
home. Please come forward with your
questions and we also take questions from
online.
Anybody? Don't be shy.
No questions, no sense
at all.
So there was a question,
just a quick question.
Do you also sell the kids on site?
Yes, I do. Actually, we do.
The kits are available in the hard
working area right there in see with the
white umbrellas are it's a FPGA
right there.
I have some you can just follow him after
the session. So yeah, I think he's
willing to give you one.
More.
Thank you. Is there anybody else?
Well, I guess not.
Thank you very much, overflew.
Please have a great Congress.
Last week.