All right, the sound is good? The camera's good? All right, thanks a lot, guys.
Okay, so I'm Joe. My handle's, that can be Hardware Hacker or Heavyweight Hacker,
if you're worried about 400-pound hackers. A little small for that.
And, all right, so I put this talk together for kind of two opposite reasons,
and that is because all of us either fall into two categories.
We're either interested in hardware hacking and want to do it, or we already do it and we like it
and we're excited about it, or we want to teach it to someone else, right?
Like, we want to get other people excited about it and get our friends doing it or other people, right?
So whichever end of that spectrum you're on, I figured it was kind of good to talk about, you know,
what has hardware hacking been, what might it be, and where it's going, how it evolves,
you know, where it is now, and what we need to be doing as, like, a call to action as hardware hackers, right?
So, yeah.
So it's kind of a basic talk, although it is also directed in a philosophical sense to those of us
that are a little more advanced hardware hackers.
And then I also wanted to leave a bunch of time for Q&A or also kind of spitting out idea type of things
because, you know, as I pointed out here, I'm the founder of HackerBoxes,
which I know a lot of you have probably stopped by and talked to us in the vendor area,
but we make kits for hardware hackers, a new kit every month,
and I think that that, you know, can give an opportunity here for us to have a little bit of a Q&A,
a conversation kind of thing because we want to hear from people that are interested in hardware hacking
or are doing it or maybe even use our product, what type of things that you're interested in
or want to work on in the future, and then also give you an opportunity to ask questions
as to, you know, what we see being the cool new thing in DIY electronics and hardware hacking
and what we like about that and how we see our hobby field kind of evolving.
All right.
So at the core of all hacking, really,
but I think hardware hacking particularly is this literary notion.
I mean, it's a notion that's founded and bound in literary field of the competent man.
It can also be a competent woman, of course,
but so this notion of a competent man is someone who can do things, right?
So, like, we all have that friend who, you know, he gets a flat tire and he's got to call AAA,
not because he doesn't want to get his suit dirty, but because he does not know what a lug wrench is, right?
We are not those people, right?
Like, we, you know, I have little boys and I tell them, you know, when they break something,
I'm like, we're not.
We're not breakers.
We're the fixers, right?
So a competent person should be able to do things and should be able to make things
and understand how things work and fix them and understand them at a level
so that we can make new things out of them and not just use them, right?
So, you know, anyone can use a smartphone, let's say.
I see some smartphones here.
But, you know, not many people can write an app or interface with a smartphone over Bluetooth
or things like that and to really kind of embrace how do I do things and how do I change things
and how do I, you know, engage with the world instead of just being a passive consumer it is.
It is really what the hacker ethos is all about.
And hardware hackers take that to a whole new level because we grab the stuff,
the actual physical stuff and change it, right?
So I want to start by talking about the good old days of hardware hacking
because I think it's really important.
And the theme of this DEF CON 25 was old school, new school, right?
So I want to have a look at what, you know, what has been sort of the history of hardware hacking
and the theme of it.
You know, this could be nostalgic for some people or historic.
It could be historically educational for the youngsters.
So probably some of the first areas of or a fundamental area of hardware hacking
are people that are involved in amateur radio, right?
In the very old days, there wasn't Facebook and there wasn't the web
and people weren't hacking Java.
If you were interested in technology, what you were probably doing is making your own radio receiver
and then your own radio transmitter.
And, you know, you were putting up your own antenna
and figuring out how different antennas work and communicating with other people.
And, you know, and there was this whole amazing hobby,
which has actually started becoming a little more popular again because of hardware hackers
and because of the maker movement.
You know, this hobby of, like, actually making communications equipment and using it.
And so, you know, one could say this is like the original hardware hacking
was making your own antennas, making your own transmitters, right?
So anyone in here a ham?
All right.
Good job here.
That's good.
All right.
And then, you know, and then we moved into a phase where there were companies,
like Heathkit and then later RadioShack.
And there are some really great Australian companies that aren't coming to mind
that I've heard about that just make really cool kits and get people involved in building things
and really, like, bring the hardware technology right into people's hands
and let them make things and work on things.
So has anyone ever worked on a Heathkit or knows about a Heathkit?
So these are, like, back, you can see it's kind of like in the 60s and 70s looking thing.
But I know there were still some Heathkits around when I was a kid, too.
All right.
And then.
Coming into, like, the computer era, the very first personal computers,
so the very first computers that everyday people got to play with in their homes
or to actually own themselves, you had to actually build them.
Like, they were not a, it was not something you went to, you know, Walmart and bought, you know,
bought a computer.
That didn't come around until a little later.
But, you know, so, like, this was a very early computer that was an Altair.
And we worked with these types of computers by getting right into the nitty-gritty of how the processing worked.
You would actually input a byte, which would be like hitting, you know,
a key on your keyboard by setting the bits of that byte and then hitting store.
And it would go into it, put it into memory location.
So you're dealing with a computer right down at the hardware level, right?
You know, and then even the very earliest Apple computers, the Apple one was a kit and you had to build it.
This is an Apple two, which, of course, these came pre-built, but they still had all these slots.
You could, you know, make boards and jam them in there and actually interface with the equipment.
You know, I know, you know, back in the early 80s, we were still hooking things up to the joystick ports on these, on these things.
Even though it was a.
Pre-made computer, there was still kind of this idea of, you know, the hardware is mine and I get to work on it.
So, you know, and of course, just to keep it real hacker friendly, this is a, does anyone know what this is?
Yeah, this is a, this is a blue box and this is actually one that's featured in a museum and people use these for phone freaking.
They would actually hardware hackers would make these and actually take over the phone network using the tones they could create with them on them.
And I have heard the argument.
I don't know how true it is.
But I.
I don't know why anyone would lie about this, that, that the Apple computer company actually owes its existence to blue boxes because the, the, the Steve's were making these and selling them and that's how they got the money to kind of bootstrap their early Apple computer.
So, so this is an illegal device that would let you hack the telephone systems and, you know, so, so, so I, you know, I showed these kind of few examples to just remind us that we, that we, we have always as computer enthusiasts, technology people like there have always been that cutting edge.
They all fall in this category of, of those people that are, fall into that category of the description I explained of the competent man who does not, again, man or a woman who isn't just satisfied with, like, using something as a surface or superficial manner but actually wants to get into something and understand it.
They, they don't want to make a phone call.
They want to control the phone system.
Right?
They don't want to just know that the ah, social security system is or the census system is using some big computer somewhere to count them.
They want their own computer at home that they can play with.
Right?
So that's us.
And we're the modernians.
version of that so so you know we got to think about what what that means for us
you know if if 40 years someone might be in some hall like this looking at some
things that we're doing what did what you know what what should they be saying
about us like what's our what is our role in all this right so um you know I
did want to make this a little bit more of almost like a sociological talk here
so what you know just speaking generically this the evolution over time
of DIY electronics and hardware hacking and electronics in general if you think
about it is really all about abstraction so we don't have to hit the or even with
that Apple to computer you didn't have to flip the switches of what bit you
wanted what bite you wanted to load flip set the bits and then hit store you could
just hit a key and load it in because they abstracted away from what the what
what a bite going into the computer was they abstracted that into
a keyboard controller right and then that was later abstracted into a GUI and
to bring it back down to electronics things you know we don't we would never
make even if we were people who work with like an AND gate we would never
make an AND gate out of transistors anymore right unless you're like an ASIC
designer but even worse than that like we probably wouldn't even be using an
AND gate we'd be using an FPGA or even worse than that nowadays we just code
everything if you want to make some little control or something you just use
an Arduino because it's just cheap and easy and it's there right so so we've
abstracted all of these things you know and then you know and
and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and
and the abstraction goes all the way up the chain I mean now we've got things
like the Raspberry Pi that's basically a computer it's completely abstracted you
just write you know a little program like it's on your desktop computer so so
abstraction is really great because you know we're standing on the shoulders of
giants we you know we don't have to worry about setting the bits in
something or worry about what types of transistors are being used in an AND
gate or whatever like we're we're abstracted away and we can just hook
things up with jumper wires or type things on a keyboard and we're able to
do great things so so what are the pros of
this type of abstraction well you know the pro is the one one first obvious
benefit of abstraction is that it gives us a lot of simplicity right so has
anyone here using Arduino before probably probably everyone that it's
really simple I know you know I've been doing embedded work you know since way
back when we had to like you know you get a processor and you have to figure
out how to hook up the crystal oscillator to it and then it's like three
weeks later you're finally getting to load some code on it but even with all
of that knowledge and experience I still just use Arduino
all the time because I can just grab one and hook some wires up to it and it
just automatically works so that type of simplicity is great right obviously a
benefit and then another pro if you will of abstraction and computer
technology in general but specifically with hardware is just rapid advancement
if we can all do this standing on the shoulders of giants we can take things
something like let's say for example an Arduino and we can quickly wire that up
to do something like you know collect GPS information or you know
use a Wi-Fi chip to get something on the Internet or to pull some data off the
Internet which is something which would have been unheard of you know like even
just 10 years ago in the embedded world that you would just wire up some stuff
on something that a kid could use and be able to do some advanced embedded
computing like that right so so there's simplicity and then and then rapid
advancement that we can just do great things really quickly so you know so
that's all well and good but what are the what are the problems with this type
of abstraction well you know a real big
is the loss of fundamentals that because someone just takes this arduino and plays with it you know
one thing i've noticed is uh you know does that has anyone ever heard of that uh an avr micro
controller see i see one hand but everyone raised their hand for have i used an arduino and arduino
is just an avr microcontroller but you know back in the day when you were working on an embedded
system you know you could tell me what microcontroller using how much memory it had what
voltage levels it used but nowadays people just say i have the arduino they don't know that it's
you know it's a it's an avr microcontroller they don't know you know what what interface it has
on for the most part right so we're we're abstracting away from these fundamentals and
no longer do people like know these very basic things right so that's not really that big of a
problem in a day-to-day use until you have to actually do something a little trickier right
you know like you see problems in the in the arduino ecosystem a lot where someone uh has a
problem with a driver or a library to do you know to let's say to use a neopixel or something it's
not working
right it's probably uh interfering in some way with some other library they're using and you
know back in the day someone would just go in and fix it but now they're like it's a library it's
supposed to be a black box you know oh and they throw their hands in the air right i don't know
what to do so that loss of fundamentals is not great it's also not great that even though we have
more people working with things like embedded processors and you know uh and doing like
hardware hacking things and trying to you know get into other systems and how they work using
these type of technologies it's almost like they're often lacking like what are the basic
electronics concepts behind them so um and then i would say a much bigger problem than that so
that's just sort of like an educational philosophical problem right a much bigger problem
is that as these systems become more abstracted especially since as they have more of these
features now they're connecting to each other they're talking to each other you know i think
they're i think i saw uh i think my refrigerator has a mime on it doing something very untoward
all right that's a little bit of silicon valley joke there um anyway the uh
that that now we've got a security issue right so like with the apple ii
i don't think there was ever an apple ii virus right no one was ever no one ever was using their
apple ii and going i hope no one hacks my apple ii because it wasn't really connected to anything
and even if it was no one was trying to get into it you know and no one was trying to you know
when i was using an hc11 to control some leds 30 years ago i was not worried about someone trying
to hack it but now you have a raspberry pi in your living room hooked up to your tv doing whatever
you have to worry that that thing's basically a unix box i mean you know are you
is it behind a firewall like what you know and now now um you know that that's a that's kind
of a simple example but uh whenever you're doing anything now where you're connecting something to
something else which is where where our abstraction has reached right like we've
we're now to the point where we're you know right right now we're going to talk about it a minute
but the microcontroller that i love right now has a built-in wi-fi interface on it so it's on
the network right so so who can access it what can they do with it what can they change with it right
so that's something that we all have to uh start thinking a lot more about so that's kind of
you know one of the cons is that you know as we we as we know less about what's under
underneath the covers and i should say we like people that kind of use these type of things
it almost falls upon more of the the people that really want to engage the capable man to know
you know what could go wrong with this and how do i help that right sort of like the evolution
we went through in the in the 90s with computers that like now you're going to get viruses you're
going to get worms you plug it into the internet and dial up on aol you know you're going to have
to listen to i've got mail right so um so this brings about you know uh you know
what i want to make the big takeaway of this talk is the call to action is that
um i want you know really what i wanted to say was that the um you know we need to go beyond
like we work on electronics and we do hardware hacking because it's fun and we want to get into
systems but that we have to do it because we want to we want to learn about how everything
works right and we have to remember that there's almost uh um you know if i if i may engage in a
bit of puffery for a moment there's almost a a heroic mission in understanding these systems is
you know if all of a sudden all the i don't know whatever certain model of linksys router out
there all start forming some kind of crazy botnet and cause some security breach those of us who
make it our business to stick our nose into all of those routers as soon as we get them home and
figure out why they work and look at the firmware we're going to know maybe before that happens why
it happens and then when it happens we'll be able to fix it so so you know there's kind of a a um
you know almost like a a duty or at least a an ability to help that comes with being a hardware
hacker and understanding how things work especially if you're a hardware hacker and understanding how
things work especially as they become more more abstracted and and with that i think comes the
responsibility to teach more people about stuff right so most of us in here are probably told
people like don't join random unsecured wi-fi right i mean even though most most lay people
don't think about that but probably everyone in this room has like told someone maybe your aunt or
mom or someone don't just go into starbucks and get on the wi-fi right because we're educating
people about things that we know a little more detail about and that's going to become bigger
and bigger when someone might hack into your refrigerator or take over your thermostat your
so um uh so i i said i wanted to talk a little bit about um uh maybe kind of shift gears here
and go into the future a little bit so um uh has anyone here used the esp32 processor
a couple couple people so um oh you have your badge yeah so uh awesome the um this is a
processor that uh a lot of people out there have like referred to this as the new hot processor so
uh and i'm i'm extremely fond of it we've used it quite a bit in hacker boxes already we're going to
use it even more
um and uh and and this this processor is an example of some of the things that are
like i said are the it it demonstrates some of the pros and cons of abstraction but
that i've been talking about but it's a great example of abstraction because it's just the tiny
little microcontroller you can use it through the arduino platform you can use it through other
ide platforms too but you can treat it just like it's an arduino chip once you install the
the board support for it in your arduino ide but it's basically a computer you know it's a
dual core processor i think it can run it up to 180 megahertz in most cases depending on the
implementation you can see that you know the crazy amount of ios it has it has built-in wi-fi and
bluetooth and uh it's basically a small computer you can do amazing things with it and the actual
chip itself i think is on is on the order of a few bucks and if you get them in like a module
format they're like maybe nine bucks and they're just and they're readily available they're really
amazing and it's just uh you know and so again the cons are in there that you can use something like
And it's very easily, you can very easily get into a situation where you're treating all these black boxes that are inside of this thing.
You have to treat them like black boxes.
We can't know everything about them.
But that you could end up with a situation that there's something going on with one of them that's causing a security breach or causing a, you know, something to not work correctly.
But, you know, but the benefit is, you know, you can, within minutes, hook one of these up, load some code onto it, and do some really amazing things where you're, you know, connecting to the internet, collecting data, transmitting data, you know, doing IOs, you know, just like any other microcontroller thing.
It has lots of general purpose IOs.
So, you know, we really like these processors.
And, you know, and I think this is an example of where this abstraction is leading us that, you know, that we're, you know, using processors like this or like this.
Like those in the Raspberry Pi.
They were basically getting to a place where our actual hardware, even at like a very, like, low-level, low-cost perspective is basically entire computer.
They're basically tiny entire computer systems.
And that's obviously just going to continue.
Like if I could conjecture for a minute, I would say that, you know, an area where this is going to clearly continue is that as these type of things are connected to cloud services and are able to do things like interpret speed.
And access AI things.
And more importantly, you know, exfiltrate and collect and analyze data so that anything, any embedded system that you have running might be spying on some aspects of your life depending on what sensors it has attached to it.
You know, that's, I think we're going to see more and more and more of that where this thing, these little devices, which could be, you know, ubiquitously deployed, are actually just gateways to other, you know, more advanced systems that do a lot of things that are going to require a lot of our attention to make sure we keep an eye on.
And I just want to show an example real quick.
I know we have at least one person wearing them, that this was the badge that we made for the hacker box from a couple months ago.
And we sold a lot of them here.
So a lot of people are wearing them around.
But, you know, we use this ESP32 chip.
And we were able to just basically, this is a very simple circuit that's implemented on the circuit board to just wire it up to a display and some neopixels and a buzzer.
And, you know, it has some capacitive input keys.
And we were able to make like a basically a platform that was a small computer system.
And we put it on a computer.
And we put it out there to our membership and to anyone we sold it to online.
We made a couple thousand of these.
And within like a week, someone ported an NES emulator to it.
Someone implemented a packet sniffer on it.
And that's what our, the people that are walking around with the badges are basically, it's listing out all the wireless networks it finds, what their power levels are.
And then we add a little chunk of code that, without connecting to any infrastructure, passes messages between them so we can show each other's handles on them.
I meant to be wearing mine, but the battery's worn out.
So, you know, and this is a fairly simple design that just leverages this, this system on a chip, right?
So that's the level of abstraction we're at right now is these type of things like the ESP32 are a system on a chip.
They've got all of these systems on one chip.
Super integrated, super low cost, so.
Anyway, so we've been playing around a lot with this ESP32 chip.
I think we're going to see some really great things with it.
I had mentioned that you can access it from the Arduino IDE.
Right now there are an increasing number of libraries.
Like, okay.
Almost any hardware you could want to attach to it, the Arduino library for it has now been ported to work with the ESP32 cross compiler as well.
So, you know, that's really cool that, you know, you can, you know, even like this, this LCD display, we had to make very minimal changes to the, to the existing driver for those TFT LCD displays to communicate to it from the ESP32 and, you know, as opposed to the standard Arduino library.
So, yeah.
So, like I said.
At this point, what I wanted to do is kind of not just our typical Q&A at the end of a talk where people are like, I want to ask you about this thing you said.
But I wanted to make this more of an opportunity for people to share what their thoughts might be.
Like I said, I want to give a little bit of conjecture when I said things are going more cloud based and using things that leverage the hardware to do lots of more advanced things that are either collective or data processing or whatever.
But, you know, maybe we could share some of our thoughts on where we think hardware hacking is going.
Where we would like it to go, where we hope it's going or any, anything like that.
Like I'd love to hear other people's thoughts.
And also in this Q&A, this is back to the more standard Q&A thing.
You know, I'm happy to answer any questions about anything related to hardware hacking or electronics or anything like that.
See if you can stump me.
I'll give you a prize if you can.
Just kidding.
Don't stump me.
So, yeah.
So, oh, so when I was told because we're being filmed to, if you want, you can talk into that mic or else I'll just repeat.
I'll repeat your question, so.
You have something?
Yeah, you can repeat this, but I guess my question is, like when I went to school, I always kind of thought, you know, hardware, double E, that kind of stuff was going to be the way of the future.
And then kind of when I went to the job market, I kind of feel like the last 10 years or more, like software and software hacking and all these things kind of like sucked the air out of the room.
And it's like even salary wise and all these things, you know, very software focused.
Is it just going to be a reversal or do you think, you know, hardware is going to have more luster in the future or maybe it's going to be like something that I'll have to suffer for the rest of my life?
Yeah, all right.
So that's a really good question.
Basically, the question was, let me see if I can just capture it really quickly in one statement, was that, you know, that we sort of have this division, especially you mentioned when you first go to school.
Am I an electrical engineer or a software engineer, right?
And that, you know, which of these is more important or which one is the, even from a career perspective, which one should I do?
And then I think you mentioned that it seems like software is like sucking the air out of the electronics world.
And, you know, I think another way to put that is that, you know, for any piece of electronics you make, especially if it's programmable, like even if it has a simple microcontroller or especially something like this, you make a piece of hardware, but you can put almost an infinite number of software on it.
So I think that's kind of the...
Or infinite different instances of types of software on it.
So I think that's probably another way to look at that is that, you know, you make a piece of hardware, especially if it's a universal computing machine like a, you know, like the things that we all carry around and call computers or a microcontroller like this that, depending on what peripherals are attached to it, it can run all types of software and do all types of things.
So, you know, of course there might be a lot more effort in the software, right?
But I think that, you know, my feeling on it is, and I, you know, I've kind of done both hardware.
I've done hardware and software development, but, and I consider myself an embedded engineer, which is someone who sort of does both and deals with software right where it touches the hardware.
That, you know, I don't know that that's necessarily going to change, but I think probably what we're seeing is that as the little bubble that is, you know, whatever percentage hardware and software, you know, where by definition there's less hardware than software because you can have more software on each hardware, that as that bubble gets bigger, it appears that there's more and more software.
But the hardware is getting bigger too.
And I think that, that the accessibility to working with hardware, like through things like Arduino or like the ESP32 that we looked at, that really excites me because, you know, the fact that now we've got little kids doing stuff with an Arduino that like I didn't get to do until I was, you know, like a junior in college.
And I, you know, and I actually understood what a cross compiler was and had a, you know, a circuit emulator for a microprocessor that now you see little kids.
I mean, I teach a class for high school students where like in two day, within a two day period.
I have them doing really cool stuff with an Arduino, like, you know, controlling all sorts of things, taking inputs, making processing decisions and giving outputs.
And, you know, that, that really excites me because I think we're able to get into the hardware more easily now.
You know, of course it does have that con of, you know, easy in, you're not paying the price.
You might not know what you're doing when you're in there, but at least we're doing it.
So that's a good concern, I guess.
Yeah.
Yeah, no, I agree with that.
So the statement,
was that the, the abstraction has actually encouraged more people to, to dig deeper on things.
I think that's true.
Yeah.
So, and the number's probably higher, even if you say maybe the percentage is lower or something, but, but yeah, there are more people out there playing with hardware for sure.
And that's, that's great.
I mean, we're very excited about that.
I mean, that's a, you know, I, I put, I put our logo up here to remind you guys that I work with hacker boxes and there's my email address there if you need to contact me.
But, you know, at hacker boxes, our, our, our goal is to get more people playing with hardware, right?
So we, you know, we encourage that and, you know, we're, we're really excited to see how,
how enthusiastic people are about, you know, oh, I'm, you know, I think it's really cool how, you know, I was able to do this with my last kit and, and it's a, it's really, really refreshing.
Cause I think, I think we went through a period there where being a computer enthusiast meant maybe you had a website or maybe you learned how to do JavaScript or something like that.
And it seemed like, you know, I've noticed in every generation, people are like, when I was a kid, people were like, oh, these kids with their Apple two computers, they don't, none of them know how to build a radio receiver.
Right.
And then like, it seemed like when I was first working in industry, you know, my peers were like, oh,
they didn't learn, you know, see programming language and assembly like we did.
They're all playing with Java, you know, and, and then there went through a period where it was like, oh, they're just using web browsers.
And it's like, I think whatever anyone's working on at that moment, it's like, they're at the edge of the bubble, expand, expanding the bubble.
And that's great.
You know, we just need to keep people excited and, you know, and remember these things we need to be aware of, like as we change paradigms, like as moving from the, you know, independent in individual hardware things, like a, like an old style microcontroller to moving to something that can be on the network and talk to other things that, that those jumps in paradigm.
Create opportunities for sure.
IoT is the big opportunity there, but then create responsibility and, you know, and, and potential threats like the fact that now our, our thermostats can get viruses.
Right.
Yeah.
Are we, let's have, let's have some more ideas.
You, I think we've got still like 20 minutes.
All right.
So that there was a two part question.
The first one was in hacker boxes.
Will we ever do software defined radio?
And my answer to that, since I've worked in software defined radio before, is I would love to do that if we can figure out something that's, that's reasonably accessible to our typical customer.
And, you know,
and fits within the, the, the budget scale.
So it's definitely something we'd be open to.
I know one thing, you know, we, we try not to give too many spoilers in hacker box because it's a surprise box.
But one thing that we've talked about doing is using some, some basic radio, basically available like ISM band radio technology.
And then having the box focus on modulation techniques, like learning different modulation techniques in a DSP sense.
That's a little bit of an advanced topic, but I think if we could make that, if we could figure out a way to make that nicely accessible, we would do that.
Cause that, that'd be pretty cool.
But, and then the other, the second question was, oh, where, where, where might we go with the ESP 32 or what the next step after that might be?
I think that's a great question.
I hadn't thought about that at all.
Cause the, it's like the ESP 32 is so new and cool.
I hadn't thought about what will it be next.
I know if I could just like wave a wand at the ESP 32 and change something about it, I wish it had video.
Like, you know, cause that's a, that's still kind of the difference between that thing still feels like a, a microcontroller and like the classic sense of like a, you know, the 8051 or HD11 or whatever.
That versus the things that are more like the, the, uh, the system on a chip processors in the Raspberry Pi is that the chips you're seeing in like the Raspberry Pi or the other Pi boards or, um, some other things like that is that they have video capabilities and you can plug them into HDMI and it, it, it, it changes the whole level of where you're operating because then you can, you know, run something like a Raspbian on it and then, you know, treat it more like it's a computer and just hook up a keyboard and start typing away.
It's not, it doesn't feel like it's more of like a hardware target, like, like the, the ESP 32 does.
So.
I don't know if that really fits in with the model of what, of what Espressif is doing with these, but I mean, I think that would be really cool, but I mean, I, it also seems like that might be a different beast, but also maybe adding more communications.
Uh, you know, I don't really even know what they'd add now that it has a BLE and, uh, wifi.
I don't know what would come next, but, um, you know, I mean, obviously interconnecting things is really a key importance.
So.
Yeah.
Like maybe something that was a little more like, so you could do a software defined radio.
Yeah, turn it, turn it into a software defined radio.
That might be, yeah.
Yeah.
Looking over the years, it's really increasing levels of integration in terms of just how much is on the chip.
How much further can they take it?
I mean, looking at the ESP, I mean, it's like a room, well, it used to be a whole room full of equipment.
Right.
Now it's unbelievable how much is on the chip.
Yeah.
Further.
Further.
I mean, I, you know, I, I, I probably, I probably shouldn't try to answer that.
I mean, cause it's a, that's a tough question or, or you'd probably know the answer, but it's a, I mean, you know, Moore's law tells us that the device, uh, scales, meaning how big a transistor is, is getting smaller and smaller.
And then technology is like being able to stack them.
And then more importantly, getting the heat out of them.
Those things just keep advancing and advancing.
I'm not thinking in terms of, I was only talking physics, how small can you make it.
I was thinking more in terms of the functionality, the modular functionality.
I mean, after a certain point, it gets so specialized.
Right.
That it's no longer as useful.
Right.
So that, so that's a good point is the specialization issue is that, um, you know, once you have something that can actually compute, meaning you can do basic processing and load and store data, which is what a basic processor does.
Right.
Once you can do that.
And then once you can interface it to other things, meaning that it has USB or it has wifi or it has serial ports or whatever, and then it can interface to, you know, sensors and actuators, meaning it has GPIO.
What else is there really?
Right.
So that's why I said, you know, I don't know.
Maybe things are things like video interfaces, camera interfaces.
I mean, just cause you know.
I guess maybe, maybe more to put it more plainly, what I was thinking in that is as these things become more capable, making them more able to deal with what we call natural data or natural signals, meaning voice, video, vision, things like that, like that might be the next step is that, you know, we, we need to have the, the, uh, uh, the capacity and the interfaces on these things to be able to get audio signals into them, video signals into them so that they can do, you know, the processing that we're doing right here.
Like it's, that's just kind of an IO problem.
Right.
But I don't know if that's, uh, if that might be where we see things moving towards or, you know, any other comments or questions or.
I think as we jump forward in hardware advances, there's a brief pause as people hope to see how much software advances we can get into it.
I think as we, the last thing I've heard is that they're now putting MicroPipe on it and running that OS on it and seeing what they can do with that.
Yeah.
I think that's a really great point.
Basically, uh, what, what, what, what was just stated was that there's, you know, it's sort of like a, uh, a, a fit install type of thing where like we make new hardware and then people do more and more with it from a software perspective and then we make new hardware.
And this relates to an earlier question about, you know, why does it seem like there's always more software?
Well, because we make some hardware and then we can do a lot of software with it.
And then we make some new hardware, we can do a lot of software with it.
So, so yeah, that's really cool.
And I think what, you know, one neat thing we see, which is part of this abstraction is that, you know, we see the hardware start to move in lots of directions.
So for a while we were just making faster processors, putting a little more memory on them, making the caches bigger, blah, blah, blah.
And now we're like, we're dealing more with like interfaces.
And I think it's going to be really interesting to see what happens with, uh, making the processors more capable of handling more real world things.
So they're not just about, you know, packets and key presses and putting stuff on a screen.
I think the, I think the next evolution in computing is going to be dealing.
With natural data and, and, you know, I, I'm not, I'm not speaking out of school there.
I think people have been saying this for like 20 years that, you know, I know, uh, uh, I think Intel had a big, like natural data processing research lab, like 20 years ago, or maybe 30 years ago.
So I think that dealing with things like, uh, like motion and gesturing and speech and, you know, doing, like I said, doing all the things that our brains do that allow us to communicate very naturally and that that's going to be impressive.
You know, there's definitely was a big jump that happened with smartphones when they became voice enabled, you know, that now you just pick your, your phone up.
I mean, my.
My three-year-old actually says, you know, okay, Google, when he has a question, like that's, so that, that, that's kind of crazy.
Yeah, right.
Yeah.
Which is a little scary.
And that's, and that's one of those things where like, we, you know, like I was saying earlier, like we, we, so, so the point here was that you can just say something like, okay, Google.
And now sometimes things listen, you realize something's listening to you.
And those of us that think a lot about computer systems and what that might mean, probably the first time that happened, we're like, I don't like that.
Right.
But lots of other people were like, oh, my phone's talking to me.
Right.
So, and you know, which is part of what I'm saying that we have this responsibility now to, you know, to, to, to make, to make sure that we keep being the thorn in the side of everyone else and say, maybe it's not so good that your phone's always talking, always listening to you.
Right.
So yeah.
So, um, uh, in college, um, and like, I went to, um, I remember this one, like for maker.
Right.
Um, but when I got into the industry and started working, I felt like there was a big disparity and a big gap between the, the maker stuff that was working good and like the aftermarket, like manufactured hardware.
It was just time and volume flex and harder for me to get my hands into.
So I'm just wondering like what suggestions you have to like tap into that kind of stuff?
Alright.
So this is a great question.
The question was, um, uh.
Uh.
the asker of the question commented that in college they worked with some maker things
and that they were able to get into it and use it and it was very easy and fun
and that in industry when we make things that they're much more complicated
and you can't really get into the guts of them and things like that.
And this is a little bit what I meant about the accessibility
and the kind of like the missing the fundamentals and all that
is that part of the problem with dealing with things like,
let me just use the example of Arduino,
is that it's completely abstracted away when you use an Arduino
that many things are abstracted away but that there's a processor
and that that processor when you originally have it,
there's no code on there for it to run, right?
Like part of the Arduino thing, what makes an Arduino Arduino is it has a bootloader in it.
So it's always talking to the USB port.
It's always waiting to get some more code.
So there's always something on there, right?
And so when you spin a circuit board and just put a,
even if it's that same processor, the AVR microcontroller on there,
it's not doing anything.
It doesn't have anything to talk to, right?
When you turn it on.
So you have to have something that where you can code up the bootloader.
And, you know, if it's an industry, let's say just for example,
you're making a thermostat that goes on the wall for Honeywell controls or whatever.
And it has that same processor on it that's in the, for example,
it's in the Arduino, the AVR microcontroller.
And you're going to need to write a bootloader.
You're not going to use an Arduino bootloader
because you don't want someone to try to reprogram it from Arduino.
Plus you want your own bootloader, right?
You want something that can manage your flash image areas and things like that.
So.
So that's still the problem is that, you know,
we deal with this abstraction and it's easy and fun and everything.
But then at some point you do have to step back and like,
you know, and like get real again when you're making like a real commercial system.
And there's a lot of complexity that comes with that, you know, like,
because then you have to start dealing with things like spinning the circuit board and,
you know, and, you know, managing clocks and things like that,
that just aren't, they're just not an issue
in the simplified abstracted one that we use in the maker field.
But I would say, you know, on the flip side of your concern that like, it's not as,
it's like, it's harder to get.
And it's not as fun when you're doing it at the commercial level.
You might not have done that if you hadn't done it on the fun one.
So, you know, if you, if you didn't have the easy road in to see, oh, I do like electronics.
I like playing with these things.
You might not have pursued a job in doing systems development or, or, you know,
uh, electronics designer, whatever it is where you've encountered that.
So I don't know if that answers your question, but it's a, it's a complicated world.
I mean, uh, electronics have become, has become so complicated that, you know,
I, I know, uh, um, uh, I could probably ask you guys,
how many TIGs are there in the, in the, in the EE department?
There's like 10 or 12 or something like that.
So it, uh, these fellows are also Georgia Tech alumni.
Georgia Tech has the largest electrical engineering department in the world.
And I think there's, there's 12 TIGs, which are like technical interest groups
in the electrical engineering department, something like that.
It's a very large number.
It's a disturbingly large number.
And you could almost look at it that each one of those is its own separate major, right?
So there's like RF and optics and signal processing and communications and circuits and power,
electricity and, uh, computer engineering.
Right?
There's just so many.
And it's like each one is almost its own field now.
And so if someone goes to school and studies computer engineering, they're not likely to
know how to design an antenna.
I mean, they're going to encounter little bits and pieces of it, but you know, and
that's a disturbing thing about a field as it becomes so big and complex, it's very hard
to know everything.
But, but then that brings us back to almost this whole issue of the maker thing.
If you're someone who actually sits down and makes stuff, you know, like I encounter people
that, you know, through our work with hacker boxes where they've just been playing with
the Arduino.
But then we, we use them.
We use some little, like, uh, maybe a radio radio communication board and all of a sudden
they've got a concern themselves with how long should the antenna be?
You know what, you know, well, what does it mean that it's a quarter of a wavelength?
What's a wavelength, right?
So all of a sudden they're thinking about RF stuff, you know, or they're trying to
interface with something else, but it needs a different clock rate.
And they're like, you know, Oh, you know, w w what do you mean?
I have to have like a transmission line for my clock, right?
So, you know, I, I think you can, you get exposure to these different fields when you've
got to actually do it, right?
When you do something, you feel like, I think a lot of electrical engineers first become,
you know, a little more competent about mechanical engineering when they have to put something
they've designed in a box, you know, cause all of a sudden now they have to know, like,
where should I place the holes?
What shape should they be?
So they're easy to manufacture.
How do I dissipate the heat?
Right.
And, and, and, and, and so, you know, the whole thing about the maker movement and being
a hardware hacker is getting your hands into it and just doing it.
And then when you do it, you know, you're going to bump, you're going to bump into these
walls that are the other things you don't know.
You're going to bump into the unknown, right?
More comments and questions.
How many tags are there?
Cool.
I mean, if there's nothing else, maybe we'll just wrap it up for the formality of the presentation,
but feel free to hit me up with any other questions or comments or whatever.
And I'm spending almost the entire con in the vendor space at the, at the hacker boxes
and it all goes right there.
I need to turn my shirt around.
So stop by and say hi, or if you come up with any questions, let me know, or shoot any
ideas or comments or questions to that email address.
And thanks for, thanks for coming.
Thanks for being a hardware hacker.