Hi Yes! I'm outside I Got out of the lab, decided to get some sun on a beautiful Sydney day. and yes, that is the uh original. uh 2000 Olympics Stadium behind me that is the original uh Coldron that they lit up and it didn't work but they bodged it to fix it up. Beauty Anyway I'm here at Sydney Olympic Park uh to attend Seit 2014 So I haven't been to Uh Seit before CU It's not really in the electronics uh field.

It's more of like a business technology kind of thing where you know business people get together. Heck heck, the keynote is the Uh New South Wales premere So YN first. Anyway, there's some um startups here. um, a couple of Hardware startups so it should be rather interesting.

I've got my media pass so yay! I'm the owner. look at that! Terrific! So I thought we'd go in. check it out. Let's go.

Yeah, it's not like an Electronics Industry show, but it could be some interesting stuff here. Let's give it a go. And that poor guy has angel wings on? Go figure. He drew the Short Straw Obviously look at that poor bastard and there's always someone with a fancier camera rig than mine.

I Won't get in the way, but uh, check it out. he's getting uh time. he's getting time lapse. uh video with this thing.

um several hundred shots. You need 25 shots per second obviously to so he'll get a nice video panning shot of well this stand I guess so it'll take 15 20 minutes for that thing to rise all the way up and uh, you can see it's just uh, taking individual shots there and uh, in the end, he'll end up with like 1 second worth of footage. Fantastic! And I'm here at the Cartisian Co-and with Ariel Ariel hello and he's yes, he's an EV blog viewer. Yes I am I Love it! Awesome! We all love it and you guys and with John as well.

Good day! John And uh, you guys have done a Kickstarter Yes, we have. How much did you raise? We raised $140,000 on our Kickstarter back in November December of last year, right? and that was selling nearly 100 printers and we're shipping out the first batch to, uh, the first half of the Kickstarter Awards in two months. Two months and we're scaling up for production right now. Okay, awesome and we've got a couple of prototypes and I Love how you've done the laser cut AC here and then you've just put the release on it and then bend it around the corner like that.

This, this is called curing. or actually, to give credit to the person who invented it, it's called a snid a snid snid Hing snid hinge or snid joint. snid laabs joint. Yeah, we call it curing and mostly people do it in plywood when they Las a cut plywood? Yes, yes, I've seen it, but it works very well in acrylic as well.

So uh, we sell two versions of the kit. One of them is an assemble at home and the other one is a preem version. The assembled at home is 1,600 The pre-assembled is 2,100 The world's first desktop circuit board printer. Well, I It's not the world's only desktop CER board printer because since we've launched, we now have one competitor.

Good I'm glad we have them. Is that is that a commercial? Uh, no, that's another desktop one that's AIC Agic. Look them up! AIC Print We like our competition. They're Japanese excellent.

Um, and but we beat the Japanese to Market That was fun. Fantastic. Fantastic. And it prints conductive ink onto pretty much any material you like.

Yep, it prints in silver rather than printing in Copper So we release all of the designs and all of the ink and all of the circuit boards open source so everyone can. Everyone can look at how it works. It's not currently open source, we're waiting until we ship the first batch, don't want to give our competition too much of a head start, but when it does ship, everything's going open source. So more than Happ to tell you what's inside the inks.

we use two inkjet cartridges. One of them has silver nitrate, the other one has a scopic acid, and what they do is they're both in water. They're both liquid. They jet down onto the surface of the substrate.

When they mix, they form silver and also a few other little byproducts. And that silver is conductive and sticks right to the surface of material. And then that first layer isn't hugely conductive, especially on paper. You need several layers.

so on paper, we usually print about 10 layers, whereas we can also print on4. Here's an Fr4 board and we can print is that exact same board. this one upside down printed on paper and you'll notice that these both have a soic chip in the middle and even the paper one. It's solded.

We can sold it to the paper. It's amazing. Regular paper. It is.

Okay, so it is regular paper in that We bought it from the craft store earlier today for 50 cents a sheet. not something special that we manufacture. Everyone can get their hands on and these are standard HP uh. Cartridges? Yes, they are.

and um, you're just emptying these out and refilling them. We remanufacture them ourselves. That is awesome. And you're able to buy these.

Uh, secondhand. Like empty Y? Uh, we can buy them empty, we can buy them fill and we can remanufacture them. We do all of our remanufacturing and our building house in Australia Australia made and I like how you've manufactured your uh, your snake in here. oh That's Mike he's going to like you saying that, right? Okay, I told him we shouldn't do that cuz it was too much effort.

but he convinced me when he showed it to me. da yep there he is over there. he's hiding everyone's sorry. All right, everyone's here.

They've had a great crowd here' been busy. We've been insanely busy I Didn't think we were going to be uh busy for so long, but we ran out of business cards on the first day and since then we've been printing them out. So that's a conductive business card? There you go. Dave Go ahead and measure that I can measure that is conductive.

So what sort of resistance we talking about per cm per layer? That kind of? Jaz So this this board here this is printed on paper and paper is one of the more problematic ones to print on cuz it's so porous. so porous. So this is just one layer we wouldn't usually do one layer on, uh, paper. We just needed to get this printed very quickly so that we can give it to the crowd.

Um, normally you do about 10 layers on paper and then you're looking at a comparable uh conductivity to Copper to 1 o or or half oz copper? Yes, and you can just print more and more layers. You don't get an appreciable height, change theity and then we can also print on Capon That was a new one. Yes. Make our Flex circuits.

Yep, that's an LED Matrix Yep, The next question everyone has is about resolution. Yes, so we can't quite get the same. So I I say the standard Boardhouse can do an 8 th, 8 th track Gap maybe 6 th 6 easy. We can't quite achieve the same of resolution as that.

We can achieve around about 15 to 20 thoul track gap which is pretty good. It's pretty good, but the problem with that is people who want to prototype their Pcbs are going to prototype it for production and then use this as a prototype. And they're going to use 88. Yeah.

So what have you got that potentially upgrades to? Yeah, So we are doing that right now. Okay, in the last month, we've already managed to double our resolution to get down to that 1520 Mark And that was all with software upgrades. We haven't upgraded the hardware in a while and right now our software Engineers are back in Brisbane Uh, we incorrectly. but we knew we were doing it incorrectly.

Assume that the nozzles on the cartridges were all in a straight line. Oh no, they're staggered. They're staggered. Exactly.

We knew they were staggered, but we just didn't have time to program for them being staggered. So if you have a look at this, you see that track down the bottom. It's got a really nice clean Edge and you see that track running up the side. It's got a bit a wavy Edge That's the offet.

That's the offset. I Didn't think that big. It's that big. It is that big.

Okay, I thought it was like in theorder Micron It's actually rather large, so we knew that, but we just didn't have time to program it. So when we go back and fix the model of the cartridge in the software, you'll get, uh, the wavy sided track being having a nice smooth edge just like the other one. So there's potential for the increased resolution. We're trying to increase resolution right now.

Excent Um You can on Fr4 and uh Capon just get to T- So so half sewing? Yep, y will the current printer that ships be physically capable of the steps required for higher resolution. And it's just a software upgrade? Yes, yes it is. It is. At the moment we're dealing with about three times the we we we step three times before we do one fire in so we can take that down by three times.

But the idea that you can just really quickly prototype those things quickly, That's the best part. That's the best part. That's the best part. Okay, okay okay so this this.

uh so this game took 15 20 minutes to design the board layout. Then it took 30 minutes or so to print and then another 15 minutes to assemble. So we're looking at a turnaround time from idea to working Board of an hour. So one of the things, we haven't finalized the price of the cartridges themselves yet because we haven't shipped the first batch.

We haven't finished our supply chain with the cartridges, but we're looking at around about $50 for a pair of cartridges. You have to buy them in pairs cuz you need both. And how many typical size boards can that do this? The best part? So if you go down to the office supply store, you buy a $50 Inkjet cartridge. It's about how much they cost.

They have four milliliters of incab. Ridiculous. Ric they Char ours can hold 42 M and they come with 42, right? So you don't short Change Excellent. And that's enough until you figure out that's the best way to do business.

And then you're going to no, we're not going to be doing that. We're not going to be doing that. Uh, the uh. this board was about four layers.

I Don't know what the size of the board is. a few centimet by a few centimet. you can print dozens and dozens and dozens of these on a single cartridge. a single pair of cartridges.

So we're looking at the cost of the silver ink being about 20 cents for this board. That's pretty good. So what sort of electronics have you got inside this thing? I See, you got a custom board on there for the C for the uh thank cable. Okay, so that's that's done with.

Pogo pins on the back there to make a connection to the physical Pogo a shield on an Arduino Okay A bit of a hodg Podge back here. Oh, is there hot glue hot? GL There's no hot glue. Don't look at it. Don't look at this part.

Uh, this is the motherboard. It's a shield on a mega. Yep. and uh, we designed that ourselves and we release the part.

We release the design open source. Well, we will be in a couple of months and there's a very there's a closeup. Now what? we're what we're actually. uh seeing here.

it looks like we're getting some uh. light glare from the stand here. so sorry about that. It's not the best, but it, uh that is just glare from the lights.

but you can see that is reflowed. and this is the one that's printed on the Uh4 Fr4 board. y so can we whack another one in? Let's try this that's printed on Capon Yep and we can see the conductive well. we can see the solder is that leaded or lead free.

Lead leaded. It works with lead free as well. but I prefer leaded cuz it reflows at a lot of temperature right? Yeah, of course. And here's it on paper and this is a paper one on Craft on on what density Bond Paper is that? um I think it's 200 GSM right? It's actually not like pure paper.

it's called linen paper. Oh okay L that that looks really impressive for printing on paper. That's fantastic. Awesome! I Hope it does well.

thank you very much AR Thank you All right mate And I'm here with Danny from Goar and he's a viewer as well and we met at the electronics uh show back in 2010 I think and now you've got your own startup? Tell us about it. I do Thanks! Dave Uh So my startup is called Goar and basically we're about giving drivers real time information as they drive to help them understand how to save fuel in their cars via a wireless VI So you plug into the system the car system via ODB That's correct, that is. so we collect data from the vehicle over the Diagnostics Port which is on uh, every vehicle man manufactured in the United States since 96. Uh, all vehicles in Australia since 2006, all vehicles in Europe since 2001, and all vehicles globally since 2008.

So most vehicles have this uh, it's a plug andplay device that we we plug into the car. we can access the vehicle sensors on there. Uh, We also have some tech built into our Um plug andplay device which tracks the vehicle in 3D space. So we've got Uh 6 Freedom motion sensors.

Ah, nice. We're able to pull those two data sets together and uh, we can do some pretty clever stuff uh with the result so we can track for example, uh, energy flow through the car. Oh right. So when you jump on the brake, you're in fact dumping energy and we're able to measure the cost as in the energy of the car.

That's correct, right? Interesting, Actually, measure the cost of your actions in real time. So we have an iPhone uh app that shows you this in real time. We'll have a bit of a closer look at it afterwards. Have is a real time uh Formula 1 inspired display that's attached to your dashboard.

It's always on. Uh, basically it's very simple. Green is most efficent. If you're red, it means you're wasting energy.

And if you're blue, it means you need to go a little harder because actually, the most efficient way to accelerate is not necessarily the slowest. So we might be telling you to push down on that throttle, which is counterintuitive. intuitive it is. So when we were doing this, uh, started this project, we're looking at how do you get information to the driver y safely in a way that they can understand and read quickly and we took a look at what for.

for one, we're doing very good. Point: Awesome. This does work. electric cars too.

Excellent! I Really like that you've already I've already figured it out. I've already figured it out. it's it's obvious. Show us here here.

We've got a a representation little dongle dongle Plug and Play like a USB stick. Uh, the Diagnostics Port is normally just down on the right hand side below the Bonnet puller and most cars, so it's actually in the driver's compartment. You don't need to get under the under the ho or do anything in the engine compartment. Plug and Play.

Yep, then we've got our display strip which just mounts with adhesive strip to the dash or wherever you'd like it to be right. Gives you a real time feedback. So this has all the smarts on board. It crunches the numbers, does all the energy calculations, figures out the car's sweet spot.

It actually learns your car learns Okay, right? Very nice. We don't take a one-sized fitall approach. Uh, so we can see our fuel tank. We can see we have $52 in the fuel tank here and if we break in an inefficient way, we can see the dollars in fact, uh adding up so you will see this motion bubble here which is our kinetic energy contract.

got it and leak out of the braking? Channel We'll see the the red drop here. Nice intuitive type display. I Like it. Thank you.

All right and yes we' got Hardware Show us some Hardware We've got prototypes you you bought these in cuz you knew I was coming I knew you were coming Dave So I thought some eye candy was well and truly on the agenda. Thank you very much. That Vera Board Classic Classic Prototype: How old is this one? Uh, this one is 2 years old Yep This was testing all of our power supplies so we've got all the simulated loads on the different on the different voltage rails there. Uh, so we're testing out the components.

Uh so this. so they were the individual power supply modules you're using in the final board down here. Is that? That's right? Yep. uh.

with. we've got this lovely first prototype here which I'm which I'm quite quite proud of. Look at that. look at that beautiful work.

Yes, yes, are they individual transistors and they are fantastic Y and a lovely um LCD display on the front there. Terrific. That was a solid weekend's work in that one. Solid weekend's work.

Yeah. And then we moved on to the next prototype, which was built up of the uh, the pick demo boards. There, you're using the 32 processor. That's right, and you're still using that in the final one we are.

How has that been? Has it been a good process to work with? I Think it's been quite good? Yeah, right. I Know there's there's a few other options out there, but we've stuck with countless options. y it's filled all of the needs so far. Okay, and this is your final.

Um, Hardware Is it? This is it? This is, uh, prototype number four, right? Uh, The Next Step From here, Dave is going to be the Uh our production model right? How close are you to actually producing these in volume? So we're going to run a crowdfunding campaign before the end of the year on what site? Uh, we're looking at Kickstarter you are looking at Kickstarter Okay, we've got our our Uh BL our Bluetooth low energy module here. Yep, uh 6 degree of Freedom sensor? Yes, uh our pick 32 of course. Uh, we've got the our Our Micro SD card here for extended memory. Uh, there's a port here that's going to connect to our peripheral device over I Squ C.

so we've got power and data over that uh over the port y micro USB on there. This is a prototype so the form factor is quite different to the final design. Uh, which will look like that one we saw before on the Y Absolutely. So on the back we've got our um flash memory real time clock over here and uh, the circuits down here.

Uh, at the base. Uh, for communicating with the various uh Automotive OBD standards. Got it? And you can log data as well? Absolutely. we' Memory: Uh, One of the KE things about this prod is it's always on whether or not your iPhone is connected.

Uh, it's always giving you feedback and always collecting data for you. So whenever you connect your app uh the data will update and you'll always have a full set of trip data. The price Target price is under $100 under 100 bucks. So uh yep, we haven't haven't decided on exactly the the price, but we will certainly for our Kickstarter campaign.

Uh, we'll do a better price for the earlier doctors. Excellent! Well I hope it works for you. Thanks for the L Thanks very much Dave And I'm here with Josiah he's from University of Newcastle Yes, yes, just up the road kind of. It's a little bit.

Northeast Sydney But yeah. awesome. And you're part of the Uh Robotics group, there are you? Yeah! So I'm the team leader of the group called the new Bots and we actually have these little robots down here. Oh, which will take a look at.

They're fantastic folks. They're How about I Pick him up. Pick him up Pi up. So these guys are fully autonomous little robots.

They play by themselves and we actually program them to do all of that. Yep, and they play Uh soccer. Is that their goal? They play soccer? Some sort of international contest? Yes. So there's an international World Cup for robots.

It's run every year. It's called Robo cup and we compete in that. Have you won? We've won in 2006 and 2008 the world title. Awesome! Yep and we're hoping for the top four this year.

And well, with a robot that looks like that, that is just awesome. Okay, and yeah, what what inspired the look? Um, this. Well, this is actually designed by a group of universities I think Astro Boy must have designed inspir? Absolutely. Oh okay, right.

So the actual right so it's more of a competition of firmware and intelligence is. Well, here's the thing. so it's a competition of the robot plat so everyone can build their own platforms. Um, but we are a machine learning lab so we ask the question, can you take some of the weaker Hardware around and make it actually work better than the better? Hardware just by giving it more smarts.

Got it. Excellent And more sensors and everything else. Exactly exactly. Okay, what is power? Okay, tell Hardware details.

what do we got here? What we got: We've got 20, 20 Motors old Dynamixel Mx28 right? So they are serial Servo Motors his arms coming off a bit. that's bad. Um, so they they run through a Serial bus and they give us all position, feedback and all the kind of information that we need to run a robot. What sort of Serial bus? Uh, it's a half duplex Rs232.

It's really bad. Oh right. Okay, oh okay. I Thought you'd at least use 42, you know? Um, yeah yeah yeah uh.

we we need something better. something in the 400s. So on the back we also have a HDMI USB Ethernet There's actually a computer in there I Was going to say what type. got a lowend atom Netbook processor in there? Got it? Yep, Uh, because you need the horsepower or it was a better and or a better development platform.

It was the best horsepower at the time and Intel's generally a little bit easier to develop the Um software for the firmware and all that kind of thing. Bunch of Motors There'd be a custom motor driver board. There's a custom motor driver board. Um I think it's it.

it all it. is is a Serial Bridge Really, it doesn't do a whole lot. Um, and it also has an IMU on it. So we have a gyroscope and accelerometer.

Just the one. um, just one gyroscope and acceler. Y right? because because it's got positional feedback from the So, it knows where its arm is, it knows where. So we we have a kinematics chain that does all of that and um, and our software is all nicely set up so you can just query you know the location of anything from anywhere else in our kinematics chain, right? it? We also have um, deflection based foot sensors there so you can see the foot sensor board and that's connected through the same serial bus.

There's a little bit of damage there, but that's okay. That's all right. Yep, right. So they can sense when, when it's like when it's actually standing.

Yeah, so it's It's four four points of contact on the four corners of the foot Where where these. so it can. It can detect when it's overbalancing. Cuz it knows, right? Because it's only on two feet Or yeah.

So we're having a few problems with smoothing out the signal there and we've got to get back to work on that to get more clean. Balan Signal out. But yes, so the robots are bouncing around like crazy on this carpet. You know it's very springy, there's a lot of slip in the feet, and um, because they have to work out where they are and we can't always see everything because we've only got one small camera.

y Um, what we've actually got to do is track our foot odometry. so it's very important that the feet don't slip. Got it? Um, so once you combine all that, yeah, you can see it just fell over. There we go.

He's standing up. Yeah, so um, they actually do fall over rather easily in this venue. Can we get him to? uh uh. I Don't know if we can get him to fall over just yet, but he falls over fairly frequently.

It's pretty easy to push him over. He doesn't have all that much balance ability right? Um, we're working on that. Um, one of the problems is the the IMU data. Yep, that comes through is very noisy when you walk.

Oh of course because you're hitting the ground all the time be the vibration. So that throws out a lot of our orientation data. Um, and we have to. We have to do some heavy filtering on that to make it work.

He's only got the one camera. he's only got a log G Tech C905 camera5 y Um, because of the atom, we only run that at 320x 240. Got it? That's probably all you'd need anyway to get image recog. Stuff is well, the the.

The thing is that we run on a symmetrical field so we have to know when we see a goal exactly how far it is. So we don't get symmetry problems so do you have to calculate that in real time as the context where you have to go there and it's an unknown size and it's erase. The more frames of image we get the the better quality. Our data.

So interesting. So our whole Vision Loop even on that atom runs in about 8 milliseconds. What we can do is we can use the the kinematics of the robot and project down to the ground plane and find the bottom of the goals. Problem is again when we start walking that throws everything out and we can't track it very well.

Can they communicate with each other? Is that contest? Okay, they have Wi-Fi Um, there's actually a part of the contest that's going to come in in the next few years called the drop In Competition. What's that? The idea is that they have a standard way of communicating what they're doing and what they're thinking and then all different teams put one robot in to make a a whole team. Oh, a whole team, right? So the robot is no longer playing with other robots where you know what they're going to do. So it's a whole other level of and he's about to kick.

He's going to kick. Maybe y Oh, he's got it. Yes, Did he no, No. So he's so he's actually seeing where the ball is at.

Yeah, that's that walk thing with the springiness. Okay, that's the springiness of the Flor doing that. Okay, you didn't You didn't. Uh, count on that here.

Well, the thing is it, it's different everywhere we go and we haven't done the walk training. What we actually do is we T Sces? Yep, Woohoo! What we actually do is we send them for Sprints around the field. Okay, um. and and we do machine learning optimization on the walk engine LS of noise in that so that the robots are a bit more robust.

That's hilarious. Yeah, he kind of gets running a bit too fast and then trips himself up. He gets all excited. It's all excited.

Come on. Wooo! Yeah! so our code is actually available. It's open source. It's on all open source.

You can even watch our development logs and see how many swear words are in there. Fantastic! So there you go. That was CIT 2014 and I was pretty impressed actually. I had no idea there'd be as much Hardware stuff as there was here and well I ran out of time to just go around and look at stuff.

too busy shooting stuff, talking to people. yeah, a few people recognize me. uh came up and wanted to chat which is always fantastic and uh I'll be coming back next year cuz I think it's it's not bad I mean it's not for engineering Electronics But there were a lot of tech companies here. a lot of tech uh, startups I Talked to a few of them but I'm very impressed so definitely be back.

Hope you enjoyed it. Catch you next time Back to the lab!.