An Interview with Kerry Scharfglass

Welcome, Kerry Scharfglass (@borgel)!

This episode is sponsored by Screaming Circuits, who are operating throughout the COVID-19 shutdown to serve medical customers (and normal customers too!). If you need priority service for a medical device related to Coronavirus, please let them know upon checkout. All other orders will be on a non-standard timeline guarantee (because of staffing, priority orders), but will have the same high quality assembly that Screaming Circuits is known for.

• Kerry was using Upverter for layout and switched to KiCad.
• He was designing a badge for DEF CON, which he did multiple years.
• The Dragonfly Badge was based upon Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age
• Synchronizing clock over IR helped each piece of hardware coordinate patterns.
• Kerry has done two HDDG talks:
  • From 1 to 100: Scaling and Selling a Personal Electronics Project'
  • Design for Manufacturing
  • There was another talk by Whitney Merrill about Badgelife that helped Chris understand people were building real hardware.
• Kerry Supercon talk about "medium scale"
• SnapEDA
• Talk with Nadya, Ben, and Zach
• Things learned from 'small scale hardware war games'
• Photos of units, colorful diagrams
• "All the different things you use profit for"
• Moving from 4 layer to 6 layer
• Kerry's first job out of school was at Lab126, the company that makes hardware for Amazon.
• At the time, they had released the Kindle and KindleFire.
• He was working on a prototype for what became the Echo.
• A (wearable) ring for Echo
• Wallwart that is cheap enough to throw into everything
• OMAP3 with DSP core
• Tracking COVID cases using phones
• Wake word on device
• Initial integration with Hue worked over UPnP
• Built with Yocto
• After Lab126, Kerry started working at Mindtribe. They were recently acquired by Accenture.
• Dockless scooter
• Speed to market as a design constraint
• How did it impact the firmware side of things?
• "If you can't communicate with the client about what you're doing, it doesn't matter what you're building at all"
• Whiteboarding as a skill in front of clients
• Mercilessly hack away at requirements
• Chris has dealt in the past with consultants who are rude (and doesn't want to be like that).
• Kerry is now the Lead firmware engineer at Span.io. They are making power panels that can work better with solar and battery systems.
• Things that are different as a full time engineer vs a consultant: "I have all of the skin in the game instead of some of the skin"
• Moving into management vs moving to smaller company
• Storage + Solar
• The Powerwall doesn't show up as a full system, it needs to be integrated by an electrician or similar.
• Industry is different than commercial
• "Designing for service"
• One customer is the home owner, one is the installer
• EEVblog videos about solar
• Changing wifi connection by the installer
• Altium to KiCad converter
• Hackaday articles
  • Inner workings of a PCB
  • Embedded file systems (LittleFS)
• Check out more about Span.io