Interview with Scott Driscoll

Featured Engineer

Scott Driscoll

Scott Driscoll - Embedded Engineer and Programmer at Sentrinsic, Inc

What are your favorite hardware tools that you use?

I really like Saleae’s Logic analyzer. It’s a joy to use, and a great combo of price and function for advanced hobbyists.

What is the hardest/trickiest bug you have ever fixed?

I’ve fought electrical noise in many projects during the past, but each time after the dust settles I’m not sure whether I ever really understand the beast any better. Avoid ground loops, connect the grounds, opto-isolation, anti-aliasing filters, covering things in foil? Nothing ever seems to be a magic bullet, except in this one case… I was using rather large electric motors to drive hydraulic pumps, and after many weeks of battle, finally figured out that the rubber hoses—which I thought were isolating the motors—actually had a metal mesh inside. I replaced the hydraulic hose with the bright orange hose they use on power company trucks (no metal inside!) and the noise vanished :)

What has been your favorite project?

While pursuing a career as a professional student I got to work on Haile (shown in the picture), an artificially intelligent robotic drummer that could accompany other human players. Our hypothesis was that a combined effort between man and machine to make music could lead to interesting results by capitalizing on the human’s creativity and the machine’s computational ability. We thought that a physical presence would aid in that collaboration. This presented a whole host of interesting problems to solve, from audio analysis to detect the tempo of human players, to trajectory planning and control over Haile’s arms. It was tricky to make sure that Haile’s drum stick always hit the drum at the right time, using a range of different volumes, note durations and motion arcs.

I also learned some painful lessons about reliability during some of our performances with Haile at conferences. One of the wires that drove a solenoid was being bent as Haile’s arm moved back and forth, and after working for what must have been tens of thousands of operations, it chose the 2nd minute of the performance to break in half. Whenever possible, I try to use videos instead of live demos nowadays :)

What are you currently working on?

I’m currently working on a MIDI touch strip music controller called VMeter. At concerts, clubs, and even weddings, many DJs and performers are using laptops on stage, which I find pretty boring to watch. I’m hoping new electronic instruments like the VMeter can help make performances more visual. The VMeter uses capacitive sensing, which gives it the ability to detect pressure as well as position.

I’m also working on a mix of industrial tech at a startup called Sentrinsic, including devices that increase the efficiency of AODD (air operated diaphragm pumps) and an iPhone bar-code equipment management program. Part of the technology I work on conducts a form of audio analysis on the pumps, which amazingly uses some of the same algorithms that I used on the robotic drummer.

How did CuriousInventor come about?

I had what felt like one of those epiphany moments during grad school, which was back in 2007. I realized that just about anyone could make any sort of gadget they could dream up. When I say gadgets, I’m thinking of things like remote control lawn mowers, automated window blinds, drink making butlers, automatic door lock openers—basically anything electronic with motors and a small brain. Or to put it differently, anything you could whip together with an arduino nowadays. The key being that none of that stuff required calculus, it just required a lot of operational knowledge, like how to set the config bits on a PIC. The goal of the company was to make it easier for hobbyists to make their ideas come to life by supplying guides, building blocks and kits.

Another barrier to hobbyists was that they didn’t need the selection of Digi-Key; I always found it extremely hard to choose the right kind of solder (resistor, pliers, etc.) among Digi-Key’s huge selection of options. We originally offered a hand-picked selection of inexpensive, but high-quality tools and parts, taking care of decision-making work for the hobbyist. Our selection also offered many things that RadioShacks didn’t carry.

For the first guide, I decided to attack soldering, got an IPC Soldering specialist certification, and learned everything I could about soldering. I put together some videos and guides with the goal of getting the important information to the hobbyist in the shortest amount of time possible. Those soldering videos were the biggest success of CuriousInventor; they have been seen well over a million times and are now used to teach electronics students in many universities and technical schools.

What direction do you see your business heading in the next few years?

Now there are over a hundred companies that cater to the electronics hobbyist, notably including sparkfun and adafruit, which were around before I even got started. You can go out and buy remote control lawn mowers and kite video cameras, and even RadioShack seems to be taking note of hobbyists again.

Sadly, we weren’t able to sell enough solder to keep CuriousInventor going as a hardware business, so it’s now transitioning into a content-advertising based business.

I’m very curious to see what happens to the hobbyist world as electronics get cheaper, more powerful, and most importantly, easier to use. Arduino unlocked a huge world of hardware to programmers and hobbyists, letting people skip the learning curve of programming with PICs. But even now, it seems ridiculous to be using 8bit microcontrollers for anything when ARM processors are only slightly more expensive. I think that within 2-3 years we’ll see a new arduino-like platform that’s based on some ultra-flexible and powerful ARM / FPGA combo. You’ll be able to program it using whatever high-level language you want with almost no learning curve, and it’ll be wirelessly connected to the Internet. You might even be able to count the android accessory kit as a more expensive precursor.