372: The Motivation of Creativity
Transcript from 372: The Motivation of Creativity with Anne Barela, Elecia White, and Christopher White.
EW (00:06):
Welcome to Embedded. I am Elecia White, here with Christopher White. Our guest this week is Anne Barela.
CW (00:16):
Hi, Anne. Welcome.
AB (00:16):
Thank you very much.
EW (00:18):
Could you tell us about yourself as if we met at a technical conference?
AB (00:25):
Sure. I'm a graduate of Caltech. I ended up at Boeing for a bit before realizing that I wanted a better challenge. So I joined the U.S. Department of State as a security engineer in the U.S. Foreign Service.
AB (00:42):
I served in a number of countries overseas, including India, Bulgaria, Finland, Greece, and Germany. And I retired after 30 years in 2018, and I was offered a consulting engineering position with Adafruit. And that's where I'm working today.
EW (01:13):
Cool. I have so many questions about all of that, really. But before we do that, we want to ask you short questions and get short answers, and we will try not to ask you all of the details that go along with it.
CW (01:27):
Called lightning round.
EW (01:28):
It's called lightning round. Are you ready?
AB (01:31):
I hope so.
CW (01:33):
Do you like to complete one project or start a dozen?
AB (01:35):
I can't split it on one versus the other. I can do two or three, but I like to get something done. Maybe it stems from Adafruit, where we document our projects and put them on the internet as open source. So I don't have...a dozen projects right now.
EW (01:57):
Do you like your LEDs to blink?
AB (02:01):
Of course. Oh, you can't work for Adafruit unless you like blinky LEDs. In embedded electronics it actually shows that something's happening. So it's really exciting.
CW (02:11):
How many languages can you say thank you in?
AB (02:14):
Well, I've been trained in Finnish, Bulgarian, and some high school German. I'd have to really kind of dig back. I'm not the great language person, so maybe a handful if I was cheating.
CW (02:32):
Finnish feels like it should count for six.
AB (02:34):
Yeah.
EW (02:34):
Do you have a favorite CircuitPython project?
AB (02:40):
There's so much you can do. I like anything that makes LEDs glow and oftentimes something that maybe involves a sensor too. So you're not just going to some mathematical pattern. It's actually to the ambience, or to the temperature, or something like that. So it's very interactive.
CW (03:06):
Do you have a favorite restaurant that you remember, not in the United States?
AB (03:10):
Yes. I was in Kathmandu, Nepal, and there weren't a great number of alternatives that weren't maybe local fare or the hotel, but I found this wonderful German restaurant that was on the rooftop of some building. And I had a wonderful wiener schnitzel.
EW (03:38):
If you could teach a college course, what would you want to teach?
AB (03:41):
I believe I'd like to teach something about introduction to embedded electronics. My focus at Caltech was in microprocessors back in my day, but I just really like building something that you can easily not spend weeks on. You put some code in, and you have it look at certain things, and it provides certain outputs.
AB (04:12):
And with today's tools, you can do that within less than an hour, versus back in the day, where you're compiling, and flipping switches, and doing all that stuff. It might take you days really to teach folks how to do it.
CW (04:32):
And do you have a tip you think everyone should know?
AB (04:35):
Sure. In my writing and practice, so many people, when the instructions say, "Use a USB cable," they use the little one that comes with the phone-charging battery packs. And those only usually have the power wires, and they will not work when you're trying to do computer to electronics communications.
AB (05:02):
And they get very upset and frustrated that their project isn't working. So I've emphasized it in books. We emphasize it at Adafruit. Buy a decent cable from a reputable manufacturer that you know when you plug it in, it'll actually work, and it might not break when you flex it a little bit.
EW (05:24):
Okay. I have some questions about your time with the Foreign Service. How does an electrical engineer play into, I mean, what does an electrical engineer do?
AB (05:38):
In my particular instance, I was hired as a security engineering officer.
EW (05:46):
What does that mean?
AB (05:47):
That means that...besides your education at the university, you're trained in various security systems used by the government to protect facilities, protect classified information, and protect people.
AB (06:08):
And then those systems are used both domestically, and in all the embassies and consulates the U.S. has overseas that provide services, both to the American people, and interface with diplomats from other countries.
EW (06:30):
Is it very much design work, or is it primarily implementing other security measures?
AB (06:38):
Well, back when I started, it was both. I worked in an R&D group, and we did design of new systems in Washington. But overseas, it began more as implementation, and maintenance, and that type of work, until the African bombings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in 1998.
AB (07:11):
Then the State Department hired a group of technicians who were providing a lot of the maintenance and support, allowing the engineers to do more management and design.
EW (07:25):
And when you say security, do you mean what I would colloquially call burglar alarms?
AB (07:34):
Sure. If you imagine a typical American embassy these days, there would be a perimeter to screen people and keep people who might just want to walk up to things, they'd have to go to a screening point where they are checked for various things that you don't want inside, like guns and stuff.
AB (08:04):
And then inside, with the buildings, you have locks, and you have alarms to again protect the three things. You'd want to protect people, and all of the computers, and facilities. And you want to protect classified information also.
EW (08:28):
How do you get from there to Adafruit?
AB (08:33):
Well, again, I really liked building systems when I was at Caltech, but my jobs and various things didn't really allow me to continue to do that. But I want to say it was about 2013, I was realizing that I really wanted to pick up a hobby again, and that type of thing still intrigued me.
AB (09:03):
So I started to see what was available, and of course, like a great number of people, stumbled onto things like Arduino. And it's like, "Oh, wow, this is a lot easier than it was prior to learning before." And so I started working with it, and I bought parts from Adafruit, and SparkFun, and others, just like many people.
AB (09:33):
That was about the time where Adafruit introduced their Trinket boards, based on the Attiny85 microcontroller. And it was meant kind of as a lower price point than an Arduino...An Arduino at the time could cost $30 for an Uno, which was quite a bit, and Trinket was about $10.
AB (10:00):
So I started playing with Trinket, and I found that it had limitations. You couldn't do everything that an Arduino could do. And even if you wanted say to move a servo, the servo library on a Uno does not work with 85. So I started looking on the internet for solutions and writing my own code.
AB (10:27):
And I demoed my results on Adafruit's "Ask an Engineer" videocast on Wednesdays, and they were intrigued. And they said, "Well, would you write some tutorials on some of the stuff you're writing up on Trinket?" I said, "Sure, I need to check with the government to make sure they're okay with that."
AB (10:51):
And it didn't interfere with my job. It's like basic electronics. And that's how I started writing ad hoc for Adafruit, and so I've kept in their orbit for a number of years. And that's how I came to know Limor Fried and Phil Torrone at Adafruit.
EW (11:19):
The maker culture, it sounds like you became part of it. Did you mean to? I mean, were you like, "Oh, look at all of these makers around, they seem interesting?" Or was it, "Look at these boards. I can build something?"
AB (11:33):
I would kind of say that I fell into it, but I mean, it was a lucky confluence of things, that I was working in some parts of electronics that were useful to others, and I was more than happy to have others share that. I started learning terms like open source software and...that's great.
AB (12:06):
I mean, I'd contributed to Wikipedia some, but while I was at the State Department, mostly on my own time, I contributed quite a bit to the department's internal Wiki called Diplopedia. And I felt that that was kind of a giving back to the community.
AB (12:27):
And giving back to the electronics community and makers seemed to come naturally with the types of work I was doing to implement different types of programs on Trinkets. So it all worked out nicely. And I've found that the maker community is very welcoming and the type of environment that I really like to thrive in.
EW (13:02):
Has your experience with technology around the world changed your perspective with respect to the maker culture?
AB (13:12):
Perhaps. I mean, I've seen a lot of different cultures, and I can see applications of technology where they might not be obvious to somebody in the United States or Europe, but they may be useful in India or Africa.
AB (13:35):
And also that there are a lot of very talented makers in other countries that contribute to open source hardware and software, and that those people should be encouraged and welcomed into the maker community. It only makes us stronger.
EW (14:02):
For sure. So technology applications in places we don't expect, or that aren't necessarily obvious. Do you have any examples?
AB (14:15):
Well, in India, they're having a very bad time with COVID. And I think that some of the open source solutions for ventilators and other air quality monitoring could be used very effectively in India.
AB (14:32):
But also water quality, air quality. I love the projects in places like Africa, where it brings light and clean cooking to villages that might not have electricity projects like that.
EW (14:53):
On the other hand, maintaining electronics under adverse conditions,...and getting power. How do we balance, "Yes. Technology can solve this," with, "Oh, but you need all of this additional...infrastructure that you may not have?"
AB (15:12):
I think that devices can now be built simply with the building blocks that are now available that might not have only a few years ago. There are projects built with, again, Adafruit, or SparkFun, or other technologies, that are in very harsh environments.
AB (15:42):
There was a project where some scientists were monitoring water levels and other environmental factors in the Arizona desert. There have been satellites launched with Adafruit products and CircuitPython...It's working just fine. And you don't need military-grade radiation-hardened materials.
AB (16:10):
It's now a challenge to kind of match up what are the needs in places, and are there components, modules, whatever, to try to solve that? And then factor in some of the reliability that...it's not going to burn out when it's either subjected to 130 degrees Fahrenheit or below freezing.
EW (16:39):
Over the course of my career, which is about a decade shorter than yours, I was surprised, shocked, at how the boards became so cheap. How they went from a $10,000 dev board to a $4 dev board in what seemed like no time at all. Did you watch that happen, or were you involved with other things at that point?
AB (17:09):
...As an electrical engineer, I'm subscribed to the publications that are available, and I watched a fair amount in real time. It was easier for me. I did a lot of hobbyist work in PCs and building PCs. That's how I kind of bridged the gap before I took up microcontrollers.
AB (17:40):
So one could see Moore's law fairly easily in that world. I don't want to truly say it was Moore's law with microcontrollers. I think there was competition. There were modern applications that helped drive some of the development of more powerful microcontrollers.
AB (18:09):
And...one has to agree that Arduino helped quite a bit, that having a larger group be able to program devices obviously helped Atmel and Microchip, but it provided an impetus to other manufacturers to provide solutions that weren't $1000 a board.
AB (18:37):
And I really applaud again the companies, the hobbyist companies, who took some of those microcontrollers and built dev boards that weren't the reference boards from the big chip makers, that actually put these in the hands of people.
AB (18:58):
One of the sayings I really like is that if somebody makes a good dev board, you're not learning how to be an electrical engineer in order to program it.
AB (19:13):
You're focusing on your project, the art you're working on, the idea, the creativeness. And not how to actually learn what all the pins are, and what can be programmed, and the voltages, and all the stuff that electrical engineers tend to have to do.
EW (19:37):
I think that the microcontroller dev board was a big factor, but I think it was the sensors. I think it was all of the sensors becoming, well, it wasn't that they weren't cheap, it was that they just weren't ubiquitous.
AB (19:56):
True.
EW (19:56):
And the Adafruit, or the Arduino, I don't want to call it a revolution. The Arduino outburst? Explosion? No, none of these words work. When Arduino came around, and sensors started to get built for its shields,...that was sort of magical to me.
EW (20:18):
Because you went from, "I need an IMU. It's $1000," to, "Oh, look, I can use this one. It's kind of crummier than the one I had before, but that's okay."
CW (20:32):
And it was the software part of it, too, providing support for all those sensors.
CW (20:36):
I mean, it's one thing to have an ecosystem of modules and ports, but as you say, dealing with those things as a normal embedded engineer is quite difficult. And having a library of things that support all of those devices was a huge shift, I think.
EW (20:51):
It was. Although when I started playing with the dev boards, it was the boards. Then I had to write my own drivers, and I didn't mind. But now it's so much easier.
AB (21:00):
I think Adafruit has really embraced that in that when they sell a sensor, and they scour everywhere looking for the types of sensors that people might want to put in their applications, they write the drivers, -
EW (21:20):
Yeah.
AB (21:20):
- usually in Arduino and CircuitPython. So again, the person integrating that board into whatever project doesn't have to get to the driver level. And that helps quite a bit.
EW (21:37):
You said about people being able to work on their applications, and their art, and the creative aspects. When you think about writing a tutorial, what drives you? Is there something that makes a project appeal to you?
AB (21:54):
It's the application. I mean,...early on, Limor Fried, Adafruit "Ladyada," she was very hesitant to stock generic dev boards, because they were expensive, and people didn't have an application, usually, specifically for some very expensive dev board. And then again, if you burnt it out, you were out a lot of money.
AB (22:21):
It's more like you think of what you want to do. And then you look at the ecosphere of boards which can implement your design, and then you do it. It's the motivation of creativity that drives things, rather than the available electronics, or how much technical skill you have.
AB (22:48):
And time and again, people light up when they can make things blink to the temperature, or they can use their voice into a microphone to turn something on. Or there are many simple applications that actually can be cascaded into more complex ones.
AB (23:14):
Adafruit just recently released a board in the shape of a house, and it's kind of suited to home automation. And that, just a few years ago, well, unless you go commercial, and still there, it's a very expensive proposition, but people know that they want their home to be smarter.
AB (23:42):
They have Alexa and Google, and they want things to happen when they talk or when they do something else. And the technology these days can let them do it and not have to engage a aerospace company to develop something like that.
EW (24:06):
With this home automation development board, which really is quite adorable -
CW (24:14):
It's pretty funny.
EW (24:14):
It's an ESP32. Do you have a favorite processor for running CircuitPython on?
AB (24:22):
The ESP32-S2 is a really neat microcontroller, in that it has native USB, which is required for CircuitPython. It can run Arduino and various other code. We've seen people write Go, and Lisp, and various other languages for some of the processors. But it allows one to get in a low price point.
AB (24:49):
And obviously in the last couple months that has actually been overtaken by the RP2040 -
CW (24:58):
[Affirmative].
AB (25:01):
- just on the Raspberry Pi Pico board, and now being seen on other boards by other manufacturers. The capabilities and the sheer price have made it a game changer, even though it might not be as powerful as some other microcontrollers.
AB (25:20):
It puts the hardware in people's hands at an affordable price. But I work on both old PCs and very new PCs. I like power...I don't drive a big fancy car, but I like big fancy computers. And in that vein, Microchip SAMD51 is always a favorite because it's powerful.
AB (25:54):
It's got lots of peripherals, and memory, and flash...A version of that's the basis of Adafruit's Grand Central, which is a successor to the Arduino, what is it, the large one. It can do anything. So, I mean, one can start there and then scale down a projects. So I love that microcontroller quite a bit.
EW (26:23):
That's a Cortex-M4, so -
AB (26:26):
Yes.
EW (26:26):
- a lot bigger than the M0s in the SAMD21. Cool.
AB (26:33):
...It has a floating-point unit too, which, for a lot of sensor applications, you may be recording temperature in fractions of a degree, or other measurements, and it can handle that very easily.
EW (26:53):
Floating-point is for the lazy. No, no that's not true.
CW (26:58):
How are you thinking about the growing parts shortage and difficulties sourcing things? Are you worried about that, as kind of a maker advocate, that it's going to hurt the hobby, or do you think people will find workarounds?
AB (27:17):
I'm happy that at this point in time, there are quite a few different alternatives. I mean, back in the early Arduino days, you might say the ATmega328P, if that...had a shortage, then a lot of people would say doom and gloom and everything. And they might have to learn PIC microcontrollers or something and be very sad.
EW (27:49):
Anything but that.
AB (27:52):
But these days, Arduino code, or even better, CircuitPython, or MicroPython, a lot the code can be written, and it can run on different microcontrollers, maybe with a couple tweaks. So you don't have to retool your entire software for the chip that you're using.
AB (28:22):
So if one is making something and there's a shortage of SAMD21 M0s, then one might switch over to another process for like ESP32-S2. Or you might just say, "Okay, I want Wi-Fi," and go for the nRF52840 or 32. But yes, chip shortages are concerning and one's favorite things might not be as easily available.
AB (28:57):
I think it's really going to hurt the smaller manufacturers who have limited product ranges and don't have the buying clout of some of the larger companies. But hopefully the maker community kind of realizes what's going on and adapts to help the user base.
EW (29:23):
That makes sense. I mean, we have a lot of boards in our garage if people need them.
CW (29:28):
They're pretty old.
EW (29:30):
Oh, yeah.
CW (29:31):
But no, that makes sense. And...in a lot of ways...the infrastructure that's built up CircuitPython, or Arduino, has made it more resilient than professional work. Because you can switch out easily as a hobbyist when you really can't as a product designer, because you have to source millions sometimes.
AB (29:54):
Yeah, I've heard that there's issues with companies like car manufacturers who have a very specific chip that they have engineered. And they're spending a lot of money and sourcing a lot of parts.
AB (30:08):
I really find that the device suppliers these days, Digi-Key, Mouser, those types of companies, have the tools in which you can get a feel for what's available in the world a lot easier than previously, that you had a catalog, and you'd phone in, and be told no, no, no.
AB (30:34):
And more in real time, you can say, "Okay, I've sourced a thousand SAMD21s, and I can make my run."
EW (30:45):
You have been writing tutorials for Adafruit for a while. Years. I think you said 2013. I don't know if they start there, with the tutorials, but you've written a lot of them. Do you have a favorite?
AB (31:01):
Oh, you would ask the tough questions.
EW (31:05):
Do you have a least favorite? I mean, that's -
AB (31:09):
No, I wouldn't want to say that. I really like some of the early Trinket ones, but I think the tutorials done with the Adafruit Circuit Playground Express. I think those are my favorite, because everything, not everything, but quite a bit of what you might want to do with it is already on the board.
AB (31:34):
You've got your NeoPixel programmable LEDs, you have all the sensors, and the processor, and buttons, and things. So you can kind of do everything right there. And if you want to add stuff on, you can just use alligator clips or whatever, and do things very easily.
AB (31:56):
And things have come along to provide some more innovation, like the STEMMA connectors. That's what Adafruit calls it. Qwicc and SparkFun, which provide more of a solderless solution if you want to add something to a board.
AB (32:17):
And I like that a lot. But I think I took a lot of my tutorial work on Circuit Playground Express and that's formed part of the basis for the book I wrote on the board.
EW (32:31):
Okay. That was a fine answer, but I think you're wrong. You wrote one about the Han Solo blaster that was probably my favorite. You also wrote one about animating a stuffed animal.
EW (32:47):
And I know those are pretty far back, but do you want to talk about either one of those? Because they were pretty funny.
AB (32:57):
Sure. They sell blaster toys, but they didn't do what I wanted it to do. And so I reverse engineered it and figured out where existing wires and stuff went. And I put in a sound board and electronics that made it do what I want to do.
AB (33:21):
That type of work has kind of evolved, at least at Adafruit, to the point where there are tutorials on 3D printing lightsabers. And Adafruit has a specific board that allows for animating the lights, and buttons, and stuff one might want to do for a lightsaber.
AB (33:45):
So I've found that that progression is really fun, but yeah, animating stuffed animals. I mean, people want interactivity with things. I mean, not the Furby kind of thing, that just, well I'll call that left field. But some people in the maker community are having their own personal avatars on their shoulder that interact with them.
AB (34:17):
And I think the initial work, and showing that one could automate a servo, and a light sensor, or other types of sensors to provide some sort of interactivity. I used a Beanie Baby, because they're ubiquitous, since everybody was collecting them. That was a lot of fun.
EW (34:40):
Do you have any tutorials you're working on now that you can tell us about?
AB (34:45):
I don't have any right now on my bench. I recently moved from Virginia to Florida, so I'm still kind of setting up my workbench. But I was talking to a friend of mine on the internet, and...she was asking about automating model railroading, and there's a whole group of makers who like to do that.
AB (35:17):
And that's one of the first projects I tackled, the first five projects. I automated a railroad car proximity detection board out of an Arduino for my father-in-law. And I think that things have progressed since those early days.
AB (35:39):
And I could do that better, and cheaper, and more blingy, so to speak. So I may work with her to see what she wants to do and try to cobble something out.
CW (35:56):
Gosh, I had never even considered model railroad as an application, but of course it is. And when I had model railroads as a kid,...I had a giant transformer box or the huge potentiometer, and that was the extent of the automation.
EW (36:11):
I think it's in the garage still.
CW (36:12):
Yeah, it is. Yeah, I can't imagine, wow. That's a big transformer. We should use it for something. I can't imagine what you could do now.
EW (36:22):
I just want to know, is the board going to be in the shape...of the engine or the caboose?
AB (36:30):
I wasn't thinking actually on the train. I was thinking more, you can do things like the crossing detection...There's a lot of great sensors now that do proximity detection.
AB (36:44):
You can say, "Okay, so far out, I've detected something coming up the road." And you...flash lights, and maybe lower the crossing arms, and let the train pass. Or signals, saying, "Okay, it's safe to go. Nope. You need to stop and let another train go on before you proceed." Things like that.
EW (37:09):
I don't think I'm wired for model railroad, because as you were saying, "and then you lower," I was like, "and then you lower the tied-up girl" -
CW (37:18):
No.
EW (37:18):
- "and then you have to have the hero rescue her right before the train comes through." So you need all these proximity sensors, and I'm just like, "Yeah, okay, that's - "
CW (37:26):
That's because you're a villain.
EW (37:26):
It does sound that way.
CW (37:32):
Yeah, my train had the crossing things, but it worked by weight. So it only went down once the engine was over the road. So it wasn't actually probably very safe...if you were actually a miniature person using that to know when to cross or not.
AB (37:50):
Well in 2021, I think the train world is a lot safer thanks to advances in technology.
EW (37:59):
So with your tutorials, do you write with someone in particular in mind?
AB (38:06):
I try to think of a person that has some knowledge of how to wire up things. I mean, not assume that a person is totally unfamiliar with electronics, the plus or minus of a battery, but that they have limited knowledge.
AB (38:27):
And they can read the guides that Adafruit writes for the individual components, and then say, "Okay, we're going to hook things up in a certain way," and that that's not an onerous thing that somebody can do, and then provide the software. The thing is with tutorials is the software is already written.
AB (38:58):
It's not expected that the user would have to try to figure out all of the communications...for inputs and outputs. So they can just copy the software onto the board and perform the wiring. And they actually see something happen.
AB (39:18):
The main factor I kind of keep in mind is I don't want to misstep such that somebody might get discouraged and leave the project on the bench, or just forget about it, saying, "It's too hard," or "I'll get back to it." And they walk off, and it never gets done.
AB (39:45):
I'd rather somebody actually get excited about a working project and maybe encourage them to build upon it. If it blinks, maybe it can make a sound. They can add that on...Their creativity can be added onto the tutorial's guidance and make something new, something that they would want.
EW (40:12):
That's a tough thing to balance because on one hand, you want to keep it moving. On the other hand, so many of us don't read all of the instructions, and then we get frustrated when it doesn't work.
EW (40:27):
...Do you have a strategy in writing to balance making sure people aren't discouraged by small failures versus keeping things going along?
AB (40:43):
I don't have a formal methodology. That's kind of where I'm kind of by the seat of my pants. The metric I kind of use is, where would I get frustrated if I were trying to do this from scratch, and try to write to providing the information that I would need.
AB (41:08):
And again, not as a electrical engineer, but as somebody who is trying to put the project together. Maybe that stems from back in high school, when I would go down and buy a project book from radio shack, and then the parts, and then try to put it together.
AB (41:33):
And those were pretty good, but I don't think it's quite at the same level as what you might get today with tutorials from Adafruit or Instructables, or -
EW (41:45):
I've been having some problems lately putting together a presentation, because I don't quite remember what beginners don't know. It's something that I've worked with for so long that it's hard for me to remember what the hard parts were.
CW (42:02):
Ah, the college professor problem. "What do you mean you don't understand this, kid? I've been doing this for 50 years."
EW (42:09):
Yes.
AB (42:09):
The rest is left as an exercise to the student.
EW (42:12):
Yes. Do you have that problem, or is the way you're doing things now so different than what you learned?
AB (42:22):
In writing tutorials, a lot of the fun ones are where you don't know everything about what you're working with and learning yourself as you go along. And in doing so you can run into the same problems that others might run into and try to document that.
AB (42:45):
I mean, some of the best help in tutorials, or books, or whatever, are documenting the gotchas..."Oh yeah, you don't want to use the power cable with the phone charger, because that USB cable will not work programming your board."
AB (43:07):
You want to make sure when you're programming that you copy all the files onto a CircuitPython board, or...in the Arduino development environment, you want to make sure and check these parameters for the board you're working on.
AB (43:27):
And they're oftentimes the tedious, the on-scene, non-obvious things that you might run into in a project. But if the developer of the guide has done that, hopefully they've documented those uncertain parts, so the person following the guide can seamlessly kind of work through those things.
AB (44:01):
And again, yeah, if you're kind of just glancing over things, and you don't read everything, you might accidentally miss a step. But you might realize when things don't work that you can go back.
AB (44:12):
"Oh, I missed a step," rather than the guide author not documenting a critical step, and then to them it's obvious, and to the person recreating the project they get totally lost. So I would say part of it is keeping in mind other users, and part of it is just knowing where things might go wrong.
EW (44:42):
You've written two books, "Getting Started with Adafruit Trinket" and "Getting Started with Adafruit Circuit Playground Express."
AB (44:50):
Yes.
EW (44:51):
Are these directly from your tutorials or are they new material?
AB (44:56):
The Trinket book, Make approached Adafruit and asked if they would write a book on Trinket. And Adafruit really doesn't have the staff to write a book, but I had been providing Trinket tutorials, and they referred Make to me.
AB (45:21):
And I said, "Sure." In that book, tutorials that I had written were used as well as several from other people within Adafruit. In the Circuit Playground Express book, there were some tutorials used, and other material was new that wasn't derived directly from tutorials.
AB (45:48):
And the info had to be a little more broad. It starts out with learning how to program the board in Microsoft MakeCode, which provides a fairly easy environment, and then goes to CircuitPython.
AB (46:08):
And then provides the information on setting up for an Arduino environment, but doesn't actually tell one how to program the board with Arduino.
AB (46:23):
Because the book is more of a getting started, and at the point that that book was written, I thought that using Arduino was not at the getting started level compared to four years previously when it was mandatory for using it on the Trinket.
CW (46:47):
Do you have advice for people who, I think this is happening more and more, where people at other companies, not in the makerspace necessarily, have to write tutorials for their products for a different audience than may be the most technical user.
CW (47:05):
Do you have advice for making that transition from normal technical writing to kind of making a step-by-step tutorial that's both engaging and doesn't assume things about the audience?
AB (47:19):
I think, and you might agree, having been in the industry for a bit, that some of the engineers and technical writers from several years ago might not be able to kind of make that shift. If you were used to writing datasheets and they tell you to write something for the end user in a very easy way, they might just shake their head no.
AB (47:49):
But I think with the maker movement, with how people are more skilled in technology in a broader fashion, that there are people out there who have developed skills that lend themselves very well to writing more end-user tutorials.
AB (48:18):
And...a good example is again, that Adafruit provides a forum for people to demonstrate their products in their show and tell program. Well, if somebody shows a very interesting application, they might be asked if they'd like to write a tutorial about it.
AB (48:41):
And if they do fairly well at doing that, they may have that skill where they're asked to do more tutorials. Or they can take that skill and write tutorials for other companies or other websites...It's more homegrown rather, again, than having an engineering degree.
CW (49:04):
Going back to the Foreign Service part. I don't really know much about what Foreign Service does...I mean, I have vague notions, and I've read John le Carré novels [Laughter].
EW (49:16):
Yes, that was fun.
CW (49:17):
But...it seems like it's a broader career path than maybe I was thinking, because you were an engineer, and you went into it. How did you go from school to that? How did you find it? And would you recommend people look at that as a career path from maybe a variety of backgrounds?
AB (49:36):
Sure. The U.S. State Department is tasked with diplomacy for the United States, and that's a fairly broad mandate, and one that people might see in books and stuff in a very narrow slice. But they hire tens of thousands of people. A lot of them are civil servants who work in the United States.
AB (50:07):
They have a specific group of people that are separate from civil service, and they're the Foreign Service. And what that entails is people who are trained in diplomacy and working abroad. And...part of their career is mandated that they work in embassies and consulates abroad.
AB (50:36):
So there's two ways in which you can get into the foreign service. There's what they call generalists. So you take a very broad exam on knowledge and skills. And from there, they pick people to give a oral interview, and then they select the people that they want.
AB (51:05):
And they train them in political science, economics, consular duties, and they're sent to embassies abroad. And oftentimes language as well for a specific country. And they provide interface to both the public and to the host country.
AB (51:32):
And the other group that they have, which I was able to use, is called specialist. And that includes security personnel, medical personnel, management and facilities, that have specific skills, but also get some of the diplomatic training also.
AB (51:52):
And they're sent abroad, and they provide what's essentially little ecospheres of America for both talking to the local country and to provide services to Americans who might be traveling to that country.
CW (52:11):
Okay.
EW (52:11):
That sounds like an interesting career path.
AB (52:13):
It was very interesting. I really liked it. It was non-traditional for me. I thought I would be working at Microsoft, or Apple, or other companies, but I found it a very enjoyable career. And one that provided me to see the world, and meet lots of different people, and experience different cultures at the same time.
EW (52:42):
Thank you for speaking with us. Do you have any thoughts you'd like to leave us with?
AB (52:48):
I like to consider myself an advocate for making, and open source hardware, and software. That people need not think that they need to go to engineering school or know everything about a computer in order to say they want to build something.
AB (53:09):
They want to make something move. They want it to be interactive. They want it to be blinky with lots of colors and lights. All that is possible with no formal engineering education. That people look at free tutorials, and books, and information in the makersphere, and see what they want to do.
AB (53:33):
And hopefully folks like me whose career now is to encourage people like that can assist them to make great things.
EW (53:50):
Make great things. Our guest has been Anne Barela, consulting engineer at Adafruit, and retired Senior Foreign Service Officer. Anne has written two books, "Getting Started with Adafruit Circuit Playground Express," and "Getting Started with Adafruit Trinket."
CW (54:08):
Thanks, Anne.
AB (54:10):
Thank you very much for having me.
EW (54:12):
Thank you to Christopher for producing and co-hosting. Thank you for listening. You can always contact us at show@embedded.fm, or hit the contact link on embedded.fm. And now I have a quote to leave you with from Richard Feynman. "Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn't matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go deeply enough."