 All right, we're gonna wing it all. So thanks. I was asked to give a talk, I guess, here and they... I actually gave this talk a little bit earlier and one of the organizers saw and says, hey, this sounds like an interesting thing to talk about since the theme is about Internet of Things. And I was at an event called Burning Man last year and I had brought a little sort of open source Internet of Things device that enabled people to have sex. And we'll go into what that means a little more in the course of the presentation. How many people here have heard of Burning Man? Okay, about maybe a third of the people have heard of it. So I have a few slides to sort of introduce people to this concept because it's actually a little foreign if you haven't heard of it and why we do this sort of thing. So Burning Man, about 330 days of the year, looks like this. It's a desert. And basically you bring everything in, you have to bring everything out and you leave no trace. And for seven days of the year, this desert builds a city the size of Bukitima. About 70,000 people arrive in about a period of two to three weeks and they build an entire city. So about this many people land in Singapore every 1.5 days. So it's a huge infrastructure task to build essentially a city overnight in the middle of the desert. And if you're going to build your own city, you're going to build it exactly how you want to do it. So a lot of people come and they build a lot of artwork. So you can see they actually build huge temples on the top left here made of wood that actually gets burned at the end of the event. And then all the ashes are swept away so there's no trace of the burning actually happening in the desert. There is a lot of like different like amazing cars and exhibits, huge sculptures of people the size, you know, sort of the size of small skyscrapers being built out in the desert. There's a lot of really loud music on the top left there is a speaker system that is a bus essentially coated with speakers on one side. It has 85,000 watts of power and it's actually like a number that's more reasonable to represent horsepower. It's 110 horsepower of sound coming out of the bus. So that's about the amount of power in a small sedan and that's all being used to sort of move the air around it. You can feel it from a kilometer away and a bunch of other different buses like this that drive around the desert and they have these DJ sets that everything's free there so you can go and just walk up to the bus and listen to music and so forth. And then of course there's a lot of hippies who come along and enjoy this doing a lot of very hippie things. So all these pictures that you've seen of people coming in strange costumes and doing strange things and whatever stuff in the desert is also entirely true about the event. But one of my favorite things about Burning Man is that there's like no internet and no mobile phones, right? So you don't have this thing where you have people sitting together like a group of friends just texting themselves when they're actually like right in front of each other and you also don't have the situation where you're completely attention deficit. You actually get a sense of immediacy. You actually get to sit there and you have to interact with people together. So this is like this is one of the quote-unquote art installations is a couch someone just puts out in the middle of the desert and you can sit there with your friends and talk with them and a lot of people do building and so forth. So I mean when you don't have the internet to distract you can build a city basically in two weeks whereas if we all had the internet we would just sit there and watch pictures of cats for two weeks. One important thing about being in the desert is that at night time this is what it looks like 350 days a year. It's like it's dark. There's no lights. There's no street lights. There's no infrastructure. So what happens is that people bring lights, lots and lots and lots of lights. So I don't know if people here have had a chance to see the sort of the light exhibition at down by the Marina Bay area. It's really quite pretty and actually as people were putting it together I had this sort of eerie sense that I was again at Burning Man people sort of build this weird city of lights in the middle of nowhere and they have some pretty stunning exhibitions going on down there and it gives you a sense of what it's like to be there except this you know Burning Man it's like several square kilometers coated with lights. There's this kind of really awesome light setup where someone had buried in the desert a set of discs that all communicate with each other and you can sort of do a dance dance revolution in front of like one of these moving buses and dance on the discs they all change color and just lots and lots of lights. Everything is lit because part of the problem is that if you don't have personal lighting you can get run over by a car. People have actually been injured or even killed because they're too dark at night and then people are moving around and so the lighting is actually kind of a mandatory a thing to have. So when I go there I actually camp with a group of people it's called the Institute. There are a bunch of people who primarily knew each other through university. It's three different groups together in one it's called the Fage, Relaxomat and False Profit and sort of this interesting cross-section of society where the Fage is a bunch of nerds that's where I camp with and then there's a bunch of guys who went off and became like artists and they form False Profit which is that Logan Lohler left and then a bunch of guys who went to finance and did like high volume trading stuff and they call themselves the Relaxomats and they have this sort of post apocalyptic aristocracy theme about them and so they like actually bring their own bar into the desert and set it up and serve drinks and that sort of stuff. But you know we're the nerds so we actually like to build infrastructure. We actually build like the electricity and the running water and the showers and stuff in the camp and then the bankers bring along the booze. But one of the things about being out there is that everyone has to help. I mean like it's not like you can just show up and expect things to happen in this particular camp. This is a it's hard to read from back there because of the dimness of the screen and so forth. But this is like the sign-up sheet for different tasks like people have to you know manage the jobs, do treasury, gatekeeping, web mastering, making sure that everything stays in schedule and time. And me coming from Singapore it's actually very hard for me to get involved. I can't come a month ahead of time and help cook meals or prep things. And so I've built a bunch. What I do for the camp is I actually build lighting for them at night. And so for the past few years these are some examples of the things I've built like on the left hand side here is an example of a badge I made that looks like our logo, which is very pretty but very spiky. It actually got caught in a bunch of stuff. So that was actually sort of a half good idea. And then I built a much simpler one here, which is just a small badge you could you could like put on your backpack or wherever it is to light yourself some personal lighting. And I also tried building another one previously that had some sort of connectivity that would allow people to identify where people are. But at the end of the day the problem is that all these previous iterations the depth of engagement was pretty shallow. I gave people a button they can press and then another person would flash me in the side of the room just to know if they're around. But it wasn't wasn't a really deep sense of interaction. And the other problem is that like three or four years ago sort of blinky things were sort of new and kind of cool. But now everyone's got blinky. So like when I had to go this past year I want to invent something that was different and not already out there before. So when I set up to design this badge, I had a bunch of goals, a bunch of practical kind of boring goals like reasonably priced robust mounting solution, integral batteries and LEDs, and a good radio range. But the most important piece I wanted to focus on interaction focus design. I wanted the badges to be a social ice breaker between people and not just a vanity element. And I also wanted to sort of be inclusive. I want everyone in the village that we're living together together with to start interacting. But very importantly, I had to walk a fine line to make sure this didn't turn into an SMS or chat platform. Because remember that first slide, the thing I like about brain man is we don't sit there looking at our phones the entire time. I don't want people to sit around alone and just dick around with these things for hours and playing on their own. And so I decided to model the interaction around sex. Sex is the answer to at least two problems that I had. One is how do you configure your lights? So if you have a light pattern, you want to make sure you say I want to be blue or red or green or flash to this particular way, how do you configure your lights? So instead of giving people a set of like sliders and menus to go through, I want people to actually have to find other people with light patterns they like and then interact with them and have sex with them to have their light patterns. And so the question is like what is end up being the minimum viable product for sex? This is the design of the badge that we end up happening. It has like here the light array, which you can see has a cap touch surface integral to the device. It has an OLED here for the menuing interface. And you can see the antenna here for 900 megahertz radio that was built into the device to allow people to interact. And this is just an example of what some of the lighting patterns look like at the end of the day and what the OLED is doing. So in an idle state, the OLED is actually doing an FFT of the sound around it so you can see the music pulsing by. And then you can also sort of see that there's a set of different lights. I'll talk about these more, but they have different characteristics, different spectrums, different hue, different patterns that you can go ahead and interact with people to try and breed the light pattern that you want. So the device itself is based upon a 40 megahertz Cortex-M0 plus sort of 1980s level computer technology, had 128K of flash and 16K of RAM. So it's not like a Raspberry Pi, super powerful. But we were able to fit in there a multi-threaded real-time operating system called ChibiOS. It's an open-source project. It had six concurrent threads running with the LED effects being bit-banged in the background in its own thread. So it's a pretty had a pretty beefy system. We were able to run a network stack and so forth inside of it. And when it comes to the subject of sex, sex is not just a gimmick to sort of like shock value people into. It's actually modeled like on the biological principles of sexual reproduction. Of course, when I say sex, a lot of people think about sexual reproduction. It's sort of the process of mating. That is not sex. Sex, if you type into Wikipedia, shows this picture here. Sexual reproduction is the exchange of genetic information between people, not the act of having sex. And so we end up having, defining a genome for the blinky patterns. So we have, I call it the blink-oam. It was a diploid genome, like the human. So you have a mother's and a father's pair. And you would have a chromosome, for example, for like the cyclic dimming, the pattern of cyclic dimming or the hue of the light. And we also used, made sure we used a color space called HSV, not RGB. I don't know if people are too familiar with these things, but it turns out that monitors are an RGB and so programmers tend to do the reasonable thing, which is like wham some values into RGB value and show them on the screen. And if you look at a lot of LED displays, you see a lot of very saturated, jarring colors in them. It's because the RGB space isn't a natural thing that's matched to the way that your eye sees light. And so if you want to build a user interface that looks good in your programmer and you don't really have a graphic designer, a hint is to use HSV. Basically, all the colors come out right. You can put random numbers in HSV and they actually look a little more like gentle as opposed to RGB. So one of the tricks we use was use HSV to make the mutations look more pleasant as opposed to jarring. This is what the blink home actually looked like and see. It was a little structure we had to find which would have like different you know bytes to define the period and the rate and the saturation and other different types of aspects of the genome. And then there's a question of how do you actually express the characteristics. So if you guys took biology you might remember these charts where they had like you know Mendel and his P experiment where they had like peas that were small and big or wrinkly or whatever it was and they would have these charts. And so we're a composite of two sets of genes one from the mother one from the father and how those genes get expressed depends upon expression function. For example black hair is dominant. You may have a gene for light hair but the gene for black hair will win. That's a function of how the proteins are expressed as a result of the gene. On the other hand like height is not one of those things where you have two people and just keep on breeding taller and taller people. You tend towards the median of height. You don't get infinitely tall people by breeding really tall people together. And so you have to sort of pick an expressions function. So for example here we had to choose an expression function for the saturation. How saturated with the with the lights become at the end of the day. And so we wanted actually lights to become typically saturated. We want saturation to be dominant. So we did a saturating add of the saturation sort of gene and created that. But if we if we instead took the average you would find that the lights would not be saturated tend towards a median of sort of a kind of a grayish color. And so we were able to through expression functions create a different set of variants that would come out in the population. For example I created a little hot spot this little bright light that would roll around the badge and it was engineered to be in five percent of the population in a random population. I put it in there didn't tell you on about it to see if people would just breed with it because it was different. And it turns out that by the end of the event a lot of people had found that little bright light and started breeding with people who had the bright light to make that much more common in the population which sort of like went towards one of my theories that people you know go for slightly unique traits just because of a vanity thing as opposed to being necessary fitness thing. We made like a left-handed or right-handed dominance and we did a faster slow spinning kind of kind of expression. So you can now see a little more sense of these lights so you can see for example this one here has a dimming property where it has a single cycle of dimming. This one here is two cycles of dimming and this one here is a extremely rapid hue cycling type of genetic expression. And so if you were in the situation where you wanted you saw someone's lights that you particularly like you would go up to them and you have to ask them to have sex and I made it very very important that both sides had to consent because you don't just have sex with somebody without asking first. You had to go say will you have sex with me and they have to say yes I'll have sex with you and then you go ahead and then a sperm packet will be emitted over their air to the other device. It would be received. The eggs are located are generated on demand so there's no menstruation or cycle needed. A mutation function is applied which in which case the data is converted to a gray code to allow the mutations to make more sense because if you just do mutations on like binary data you can get extreme variations if you happen to flip a high bit accidentally and we bring them back and then also the mutation rate could be increased by shaking the bag vigorously during sex. So there's an accelerometer on the inside and if you wanted to go ahead and have a greater rate of mutation you could shake it up and there's a little bar that tell you like your mutation rate and one of the things I found is that people would just shake it because they thought it was funny to shake their badge during sex and people would do this thing where they would mount a carabiner on it to mount it to their bag and they would shake it with a carabiner flapping around and we end up with a lot of broken screens because they keep on smacking into their screens. Anyways at the end of the day that would create a new genome which would be saved and it would replace the current genome that's being displayed and then finally you can go about having casual sex with your friends and this is actually like the line of C codes lines of C code that it described the process of having sex when I wrote that I was like very sort of pleased to sort of be like I just wrote sex and see that's pretty cool. When we decided to go ahead and build the hardware of course we had to fund it so I went to a platform called crowd supply which I've used several times before to go ahead and do a private funding campaign within my camp and at the end of the day we were able to build these they were assembled in China we raised about six thousand dollars you can kind of see at the end of the day what all the different expenses are if you actually use the Chinese ecosystem which is a completely different talk that I can give it turns out you can build these things for fairly cheap without losing a lot of money and then finally one thing I had to consider in the process of doing this again like I said we're in the middle of the desert so there's no challenge or no symptoms square no element 14 there's nothing right so when you bring the badges out you have to bring a full repair kit I brought a soldering iron assisted optics diagnostic tools I had spare parts period so when I talked about the people who are breaking the screens I replaced like 10 screens in the middle of the desert in the middle of a like a dust storm trying to get these people ready for the nighttime because if their badges are broken at night they're dark and it's actually a very dangerous situation I had to handle firmer updates for these devices a hundred of them in the middle of the desert so I built a little device here which can see you can just you just slot the device in and press a button I called the drunk hippie test like someone had to be able to update their own firmware where they're drunk without having to ask me to do it for them otherwise I would be doing tech support the entire time and you had to bring out chargers for a hundred units micro USB cords for units and so on so forth so a lot of the sort of life cycle management also had we thought through in the process of doing this and finally you know that that would be it for the presentation thanks all right a run of laws