Interview with Jessica Barber

Featured Engineer

Jessica Barber

Jessica Barber - Lead Hardware Engineer, LeafLabs

How did you get into electronics/ engineering and when did you start?

This is a little embarrassing. I was really into text-based role-playing games, like MUDs, when I was younger, so I kind of got my start writing code for that sort of thing. I didn’t actually get into hardware hacking until I was at MIT, where it came part and parcel with the coursework. I got into HDL and designing for FPGAs, which got me my first job, at SpaceX. There’s I started working with the more physical side of things, board layouts and wire harnesses.

What are your favorite hardware tools that you use?

Besides the necessities like oscilloscope, benchtop supply, and soldering iron, having a microscope is pretty much the best thing ever. When you’re a small company you’re always looking to save money wherever possible, so we assemble all our own prototypes by hand. I was stunned the first time I used a microscope for assembly; it was amazing to be able to solder such fine-pitch components.

What are your favorite software tools that you use?

I do all my board design and layout in KiCad. It’s got a really great community behind it, and it’s open-source, which is excellent. I use emacs for writing HDL. Working with FPGAs, you get pretty married to the vendor tools, which is unfortunate considering they’re all closed source and cost an arm and a leg. That’s something I really hope to see change in the coming years.

What is on your bookshelf?

Actually, everyone at LeafLabs kind of donated all their technical books to the company library, so we’ve got a pretty awesome and eclectic collection. Besides all the manuals and references you’d expect, we’ve also got all the fundamental classics: “Art of Electronics”, “Practical Electronics for Inventors”, “Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs”. Then lots of random books on every technical topic you could think of. My personal bookshelf has the remnants of my physics degree, and lots and lots of fiction.

Do you have any note-worthy engineering experiences?

Some of the hardware I worked on at SpaceX ended up on the International Space Station. I’m still pretty thrilled about that one. In terms of less-than-auspicious experiences, I had a robot literally go up in smoke while preparing for a competition at MIT. One of the power lines came loose and vaporized a bunch of thin-gauge wiring. Remarkably, our robot survived with relatively little damage.

Sum up the goal of LeafLabs in one sentence.

We want to make complicated tools more accessible.

What motivated you to start LeafLabs when there’s already existing development boards on the market?

Well, obviously you hope you’re bringing something new to the table, even if “development boards” is a pretty well-trafficked space. There was a lot of demand for a “32-bit Arduino”. People who got started with Arduino back when it first came out were starting to feel like they were running up against its limitations, and our hope with Maple is to make that transition to more complicated architectures as painless as possible.

How are you marketing your LeafLab products? How are you getting the word out?

It’s been pretty grassroots so far. We owe a huge debt of gratitude to our users, and to the open-source/DIY community, because they’ve really evangelized for Maple. Our best advertising probably comes from our users showing off the amazing projects they do with our boards. Recently we’ve been seeing more activity from commercial and industrial users, so right now we’re making an effort at reaching out to them, supporting that sort of project.

What are you currently working on? What has been your favorite project?

I’ll answer both of these at once: we’re getting started on a board we’re calling “Oak”, which pairs a Cortex-M3 microcontroller with a Spartan-3E FPGA. In addition to working on the board, we’re trying to come up with ways to bring that Arduino sort of ease of development to FPGAs, which I’m really excited about, and having a great time doing. I love working with FPGAs, but like I mentioned earlier, there’s a really enormous barrier to entry. I’d love to see what sort of projects come out of widespread use of FPGAs.

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