1:1 interview with TinyArcade creator Ken Burns

---

TinyArcade is the most adorable video game console you’ve ever seen.

---

Recently, we had the chance to sit down with TinyCircuits founder Ken Burns, who just wrapped up a successful Kickstarter campaign for the TinyArcade. Here’s what he had to say…

Josh Marinacci: Hi Ken. I’m one of the original Kickstarter backers of TinyCircuits and I love it. Could you tell us a little bit about TinyCircuits, why you created it, where it’s based?

Ken Burns: Thanks! TinyCircuits started as a side project while I was working at a contract engineering company. We would help other companies (from one person startups to Fortune 500 companies), develop electronic products, and prototyping was always a huge part of what we did. However, to create working prototypes usually involved creating a custom PCB (somewhat expensive and time consuming), or hobbling together a number of different development boards to create the proto, which was always ugly and usually too big.

So that’s what started the idea of a small modular system with a number of different sensors and options, and around the same time Arduino was becoming very popular so I decided to base it around that, which was the birth of the TinyDuino system. At the time it was just me in a spare bedroom of my house in Akron, Ohio, working on this and prototyping it up, but I showed it to a number of people and got a lot of great feedback, and decided to launch it on Kickstarter in the fall of 2012. The initial TinyDuino Kickstarter campaign did great, enough to convince me there was potential to create a business around it, so I left my job and committed to TinyCircuits full-time.

Three years later we’re still going strong, with a staff of 8 people and our own electronics design and manufacturing operation here in Akron, Ohio.

JM: One of our talented engineers recently built a Bluetooth wearable smartwatch using TinyCircuits. Have you seen a lot of adoption in wearables? What things do people build with it?

KB: That’s definitely a great project! Wearables is definitely something people use our stuff for a lot, it’s very small, compact, and easy to use, which makes it perfect for wearable applications. We launched the TinyScreen last year, which is a small OLED display that fits onto the TinyDuino and allows users to create add a very cool compact display to their projects.

Jewelry is one that a number of people have done, and some friends of ours are actually building out a 3D printed jewelry product based around our TinyScreen that should be launching early next year. Others are using our circuitry for wearable sensors, like for athletic and healthcare monitoring. And an eight-year old launched his own smart watch, the O Watch, on Kickstarter to teach kids 3D printing and programing earlier this fall that is built around our stuff!

JM:Has anyone used your boards for a shipping product?

KB: A few small companies have used our products for very low volume items, but a few are designing products that integrate in the TinyScreen which will be higher volume. For low to mid volume items (one to a few hundred) it makes a lot of sense to buy products like ours to integrate with, since it saves the need to design a custom PCB and do the upfront engineering. After a certain volume it’s more cost effective to design a custom board, and we actually have helped a number of companies do that with our in-house design partner.

Josh: TinyArcade is absolutely the coolest thing ever. It’s a shame it won’t be ready in time for Christmas. Why did you decide to build this product, and why run it as a KickStarter instead of just selling it like your other boards?

Ken: Thanks! We would have loved to have it out by Christmas this year, but we needed to take our time over the summer to get the design right. The TinyArcade is really an outgrowth of the TinyScreen project we did last year, one of the things people really liked about it was that you could play games on it, and a number of our users started creating games for it, like Space Invaders, Outrun, Asteroids, etc.

In the spring we saw a really little arcade cabinet candy dispenser, and thought it would be cool to put a TinyScreen in it and play games, but the size wasn’t quite right. But the idea stuck with us, and we have a designer friend (Jason Bannister from mechanimal.com) design a 3D printed cabinet which came out looking incredible. We started showing this off at different shows, like Maker Faire Bay Area, and it was a huge hit, and people kept asking to buy it. So we decided to turn it into a product.

We redesigned the TinyScreen to bring the cost down and way crank up the performance, and add things like audio, joysticks, and an SD expansion slot. The 3D printed cabinet is also fairly complex and something that needs a commercial printer to make (it can’t be printed on a Makerbot), so the prints are expensive. So we came up with a laser cut enclosure that could be made for much less but still look like a cabinet, so we could offer this at a low price.

We’ve had great luck on Kickstarter in the past, and one of the big reasons we did this again is so we can buy the components in bulk. We’re still a small startup and cash flow is always an issue, so using Kickstarter lets us buy some of the major components (like the OLED, joysticks, etc) in volume to keep the cost down. If we did it without Kickstarter, the price per unit would have to be a lot more.

JM: Where did you find those tiny joysticks?

KB: Those are super cute, aren’t they?! We used some PSP type joysticks in the past for our joystick board, but these were too big for this. These joysticks are made by CTS and actually available at places like DigiKey, and work amazingly well. They’re great for very precise analog movements. They are one of the more expensive components in the TinyArcade, but definitely worth it.

The top of the joystick is actually a knob that we designed ourselves and is a high-res 3D print, using a resin printer, so we can make it just like an old style arcade joystick.

JM: Does the TinyArcade have room for expansion? I’d love to make one connected to the internet through Bluetooth or Wi-Fi. Will you support those options?

KB: It certainly does! This is still a TinyDuino type product and maintains expansion capability, and there is room to add another board in the cabinet. Bluetooth and Wi-Wi are the two that we definitely consider the most likely, and since the platform is completely open source, it’s really up to the user’s imagination as to what they want to add. Based on how well the Kickstarter goes, and if there is community support, we’d love to see the ability for some multiplayer games over Bluetooth or Wi-Fi.

JM: With a Wi-Fi board, is it possible to do OTA updates?

KB: Right now we don’t have that capability, it really comes down to support in the bootloader. However we do support loading games and videos off a microSD card if it’s present, so it would definitely be possible to create a program to download files over Wi-i and save them to the SD card to use.

JM: What’s next for TinyCircuits? Any new products in the pipeline?

KB: We have a huge list of things in the pipeline that we would like to do, we actually have about 15 new expansion boards designed that should be hitting production early in 2016. One of the big push is into micro-robotics, so tiny servo drivers and motor drivers, new radio options, an ESP-based Wi-Fi board, many more sensors, and of course rolling out the TinyScreen+ board and the TinyZero processor board (basically the Arduino Zero, 32-bit ARM platform) which brings a new level of horsepower to the platform.

JM: Tell us a little more about the Kickstarter campaign and when do you expect it to ship?

KB The TinyArcade Kickstarter (successfully) ended on December 17^th and we plan to start shipping in March 2016. The big reason for the delay is due to getting some of the key components in, like the raw OLEDs, this takes 8 – 12 weeks from our supplier, we plan to have the other items ready to go (the PCBs built, and the cases made), before then, so we can get shipping the moment they come in.

This interview originally appeared on PubNub’s blog. 

Securing the Internet of Streams

---

The evolution of IoT is now at a point that it will require a comprehensively redesigned approach to security threats in order to ensure its continuous growth and expansion.

---

The relentless flow of new product introductions keeps fueling the gargantuan estimates of billions of connected communicating computing devices which is projected to imminently make the Internet of Things ubiquitous within every facet of our lives. The IoT has been portrayed as the key enabler of a smarter world with compelling use cases that cut across a wide array of both personal and industrial ecosystems.

A great description is that the IoT is the global nervous system. This could be a pun, as IoT is increasingly producing troubling headlines. Stories abound, detailing security breaches that sound as if they were taken from a sci-fi movie, from hacked security cameras to a spamming refrigerator.

Figure 1 (Source: re-workblog.tumblr.com)

The explosive growth of the IoT coincides with an alarming increase in reported rates of identity theft and hacker attacks on everyday gadgets and appliances. Security researchers have easily established the feasibility of attacks against TVs, cars, security cameras, and medical equipment. There is much more than stolen money on the line if these types of attacks are carried out. The evidence demonstrates that existing security mechanisms are insufficient or ill-suited to address the risks inherent with the ubiquitous deployment of the IoT.

The need for a new original approach

The traditional approach to security, applied to both consumer and business domains, is one of separation – preventing those who are considered bad actors from accessing devices and networks. However, the dynamic topology of the network environments in which IoT applications are deployed largely invalidates the separation approach, making it both impractical and overly rigid. For example, with BYOD (bring-your-own-device), enterprises struggle to apply traditional security schemes to devices that may have been compromised while outside the perimeter firewall.

Many IoT devices self-configure and run autonomously. User interaction is limited to the devices’ operations, and there are no means to change security parameters. These devices rely on the manufacturer to implement security, both in the hardware and the software.

Moreover, manufacturers have to consider the broader ecosystem, not just their own products. For example, recent research has revealed inherent security flaws in USB memory stick controller hardware and firmware. Users must be concerned not only about the safety of the data on the memory stick, but if the memory stick controller itself has somehow been compromised.

To thwart similar issues, IoT device vendors are rushing to upgrade their product portfolios to low-power, high-performance microcontrollers that include firmware upgrade and data encryption mechanisms.

Figure 2 (Source: Atmel’s White Paper: Integrating the Internet of Things)

In the hyper-connected world of IoT, security breaches will gravitate towards the weakest link in the chain. It will become very hard to maintain the confidence that any particular device, user, application or service maintains its integrity; instead, the assumption will be that things will occasionally break for a variety of reasons, over which there is little control and no method for fixing. As a result, IoT will force the adoption of new concepts for the establishment of trust.

A smarter network combined

In the loosely coupled world of IoT, security issues are driving a need for greater collaboration among the vendors participating in the ecosystem, recognizing their respective core competencies. Hardware vendors make devices smarter. Software developers make applications and services smarter. The connective tissue, the global Internet with its myriad of communication transports and protocols, is tasked with carrying the data that powers IoT. This begs the question – can the network be made an enabler of IoT security by becoming smarter in its own right?

Context is essential for identifying and handling security threats and is best understood at the application level, where the intent of information is processed. This points towards a higher-level communication framework for IoT – the Internet of Data Streams. This framework enables apps and services to view things as consumers and producers of data. It allows for descriptive representations of devices’ operational status and real-time detection of their presence or absence.

Elevating the functional value of the Internet, from a medium of communication to a network of data streams for IoT, would be highly beneficial to ease collaboration among the IoT ecosystem participants. The smarter network can provide apps and services with the ability to implement logic that detects things that break or misbehave, flagging them as suspect while ensuring graceful and consistent operation using the redundant resources.

For example, a smarter network can detect that a connected sensor stopped functioning (e.g. due to a denial of power attack, possibly triggered through some obscure security loophole) and allow the apps that depend on the sensor to provide uninterrupted service to users. Additionally, a network of data streams can foster a global industry of security-as-a-service solutions, which can, as an example, send real-time security alerts to app administrators and device manufacturers.

The evolution of IoT is now at a point that it will require a comprehensively redesigned approach to security threats in order to ensure its continuous growth and expansion. Addressing the surfaced issues from an ecosystem standpoint calls for apps, services and “things” to explicitly handle communication via a smarter data network, which has the promise of placing IoT in safer hands, courtesy of the Internet of Streams.

Atmel and IHR driving innovation in automotive electronics

Atmel has just announced a collaboration with IHR, a worldwide partner in the automotive industry, to further support the innovation of Local Interconnect Network (LIN) systems. This collaboration leverages IHR’s LIN configuration tools with Atmel’s industry-leading embedded solutions to improve application integration, time-to-market and to minimize licensing costs.

Atmel’s collaboration with IHR enables Atmel to provide manufacturers with a LIN-compliant evaluation environment to further streamline development, bringing the best of automotive engineering faster to market. IHR’s solutions support several Atmel technologies including the megaAVR, tinyAVR and XMega AVR families.

For those interested, a free demo version of the LIN drivers is now available for download via the IHR website and can be used for evaluation purposes. Upcoming new product series will be supported by IHR solutions as well.

“With nearly 30 years of experience working with the automotive industry, Atmel has spurred the pervasive growth of electronic features in cars,” explained Giovanni Fontana, Atmel Automotive Applications Director. “Our collaboration with IHR will help our customers continue to build innovative electronic products in a cost-effective manner with improved integration and intuitive configuration capabilities.”

Atmel combines a unique blend of IVN products and embedded MCUs. AVR MCUs deliver the power, performance and flexibility to support a wide range of automotive applications. These small, yet powerful, advanced 8- and 32-bit AVR MCUs deliver the technical features, advanced architecture and dependable design ideal for an array of applications.

In what has become the industry’s largest, the Atmel LIN product portfolio includes stand-alone transceivers, system basis chips (SBC) which integrate a transceiver, a voltage regulator and often other functions as well as AVR MCU-based system-in-package (SiP) and application-specific (ASSP) devices.

“IHR is recognized for our proven LIN tools used by designers to create applications that automotive manufactures rely on as competitive differentiators,” said Rüdiger Kewitz, COO at IHR GmbH. “Together with Atmel, we offer a very compelling proposition for manufacturers to not only design next-generation embedded systems, but also to bring high-end applications to market through an amplitude of makes and models.”

Interested in learning more about Atmel’s LIN solutions? Additional information is available here. You can also browse through the Bits & Pieces archive on the topic.

IoT’s 7th layer will facilitate scaling and real-time

The spurring growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) has taken rise in business, with a number of startups stemming from the software alley, Maker Movement and crowdfunded space already contributing to the industry. Within idea making and product baking, various origins ferment the constant demand for transparency and community. This reveals strong elements of Conway’s law.

The Internet of Things cannot evolve into what everyone expects it should without the larger open source component. Let’s go back and take a look at Conway’s law.  In perspective of both systems of the individual and organization, we are trying to create and the organization also creates it. Interoperability, integrations and the ability to share across communities hold the vital keys in the system.

An organization looking to build into IoT will need to help mature an open development organization, where we all have the ability to participate in the decisions, code, wiring, funding, and the ramp up of the work. By removing the attachment of intellectual property and changing the dynamics of the development team helps to keep things engaged and promotes the resolve attained by larger communities in moving forward and solving problems.

Partnerships across the breadth of business and enterprise will eventually surface the need to have wider and more comprehensive APIs; these APIs are agile and act as the seamless building blocks for sharing of data and bridging the real-time events into the symphony of various different devices, which can integrate easily into enterprise solutions. The API is the building block and cementing agent for innovative uses of connected devices — the Internet of Things.

For example, partnerships between two companies can quickly enable the creation of smart energy service, opening up opportunities to integrate energy appliances combined with data analytics showing home heating and air conditioning as well as consumer usage. An output like this not only creates added value chain, but also helps unify the customer-centric view for businesses wanting to grow closer with their customers, allowing them choices in their activity and usage.

The connected home market ― even connected consumer devices to energy harvesting ― will all require partnerships between companies, enabling them to deliver a smart energy service that integrates energy devices and appliances with data analytics around air conditioning and home heating systems designed for a device-agnostic platform. The partnership allows pools of expertise (enterprises, startups, or newly-established IoT services) to draw upon energy efficiency algorithms to enhance customers’ home energy use and automation.

Partnerships have already been used to spark and create new services for U.S. households. A growing number of sensors are emerging into the marketplace as well as threading these aggregate sensor results to end-to-end to products/solutions.

As previously seen on Bits & Pieces, we talk about PubNub. This is a service that is already widely used, distributing traffic to 200 million real-time IoT devices across 14 data centers worldwide, serving 3 millon messages a second all within a ¼ second in latency. That’s close to global real-time one can get with that many tenets/nodes on the cloud. In shear numbers, there are well over 1000s of apps leveraging this solution. In fact, this company has really got big plans for the Internet of Things, as it’s already powering thousands of real-time apps streaming 3 million messages per second to over 100 million devices each month. For example, just take some of their notable customers who are already using their services and technology to scale real-time applications and devices onto their own domain expertise solutions.

App developers like CBS Outdoor and Coca-Cola are using these integrations with real-time data aggregation transmitted by the sensors to produce some really powerful results. CBS Outdoor integrates sensors on embedded controllers to sync content on real-life digital billboards with online web displays using PubNub. Another IoT integration is found with Coca-Cola enabling friends to chat and annotate live video in real-time on the red carpet at the American Music Awards. The beverage giant has also introduced live voting (“You Decide the Ending”) and IoT experience synchronization using PubNub during their Cokechase.com campaign.

As demonstrated by both Coca-Cola and CBS Outdoor, companies are using/scaling this real-time device connectivity across their services. With their availability of an SDK kits for both Arduino (AVR-based Microcontrollers) and Rasberry Pi, Pubnub is quickly on their way to establishing a hook into the Maker Movement; a class of hackers, crowdfunded makers, creative tinkers, and app coders who can wield the power of this API to help take their ideas from prototype to a product.

This is all done with open code and idea contribution, building a collective number of APIs.

APIs are core to the expansion of IoT. What an inventor needs are the following:

1. A standard protocol (ie. Restful, CoApp, MQTT, etc)
2. A set of variables with enough data points to create a sophisticated algorithm that maximizes efficiency or augments information or experience
3. Arduino SDK (Development and Coding into AVR based Microcontrollers)

Pubnub is enabling their customers to rapidly develop, more importantly, scale real-time applications. Explore solutions to some of these examples they offer ranging from (1) challenges for IoT building, (2) building real-time dashboards to connected devices, (3) bridging devices across networks from lan to wan, (4) connecting the car, and (5) home automation.

Interested in learning more about the Arduino SDK kit? Please visit the PubNub Developer site and then get to IoT exploring. Get ready to jump start the rapid building and connecting of devices for the Internet of Things.

Microsoft Surface Pro 3 teardown reveals…

The Microsoft Surface Pro 3 is a Surface-series Windows 8.1 tablet. Making its initial debut in May 2014, the first models began shipping on June 20, 2014.

The Surface Pro 3 features a 4th generation Intel Core processor, 12-inch display, multi-stage kickstand, redesigned type cover and a battery-powered Bluetooth pen.

Recently, the iFixit crew conducted a detailed teardown of Microsoft’s latest tablet, finding Atmel’s AT24C16 two-wire serial EEPROM, as well as Atmel’s UC256L3U 256KB Flash, 32-bit AVR microcontroller.

Interested in learning more about Microsoft’s Surface Pro 3? You can check out the tablet’s official product page here and iFixit’s full teardown here.

Readers may also want to check out some other recent teardowns featuring Atmel components, including the Narrative, Xiaomi MiPad and the Black & Decker Gyro screwdriver.