New Year Education

Welcome back, Akiba of Freaklabs!

• Akiba was on the show back in April of 2015.
• Freaklabs is moving from a consultancy to a product company.
• One product that came out this year was a rice farm monitoring sensor node system. Developed in conjunction with the University of Tokyo.
  • Uses single hop nodes with long range radios (couple kM)
  • One aggregator node uses 3G to upload data.
  • Software stack is Python flask
• Another sensor network project lets farmers know when there are boar (an invasive species) are caught in traps.
• Pigs in Space!
• For prototyping, Akiba normally uses Dirty PCBs/Seeed for getting PCBs manufactured.
• The Hackerfarm (located in Kamagowa) is still going strong!
• Akiba and Chris are both very big on apprenticeship.
• Chris has an issue when he was at the ECEDHA conference and company heads said they weren't interested in practical education.
• Akiba's sister founded Hackermoms in Oakland.
• The rise of HWstartups gives Akiba hope. He and Bunnie give tours to students from the MIT media lab.
• They visited a mannequin factory. Creepy!
• Quality factors in China require people on site to crack the whip. Akiba's gf had a low quality product delivered to her because the quoting company subcontracted to an unproven smaller print house.
• Depression in technology can come from a lot of places. One of them is the seemingly endless treadmill of technology.
• In 2016, Akiba wants to create products that strike a chord with people. Not necessarily super technical products.
• One example is an electronic, "Choose Your Own Adventure" children's book.
• Imposter syndrome, Hero culture and Ego are things we all have to deal with in technology.
• "Nose to the grindstone, head to the stars" ~ The Roots, "Sacrifice"

Happy 2016! Thank you to everyone for supporting and listening to the show!