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• Gobot room at conferences (GopherCon) |
• Ron Evans' collection of TSA notices and solutions |
• Community day at GopherCon with hardware jam session |
• Hardware lending library and sharing of ideas |
• Beginner-friendliness of Gobot and ease of use |
• Ron Evans' "Santa Claus complex" giving away hardware |
**Erik St. Martin:** Welcome back, everybody, for another episode of GoTime. Today's episode is number 37, and our sponsors for today's show are Backtrace and The Ultimate Go Training series. |
On the show today we have myself, Erik St. Martin, Carlisia Pinto is also here - say hello, Carlisia... |
**Carlisia Thompson:** Hey, everybody. |
**Erik St. Martin:** And Brian Ketelsen who, if you were listening to the pre-show, is crazy hyped up today. Say hello, Brian... |
**Brian Ketelsen:** I'm not your trained monkey, I'm not gonna say hello on demand. |
**Ron Evans:** He's supposed to say, "Hello, Brian." |
**Brian Ketelsen:** Oh, hello Brian. |
**Erik St. Martin:** You will say it or we will pause the show. |
**Brian Ketelsen:** Okay... |
**Erik St. Martin:** I'll call your bluff. \[laughter\] |
**Carlisia Thompson:** Such a rebel. |
**Brian Ketelsen:** And let all of our 12 listeners down? You will never do it. I call you on that one. |
**Erik St. Martin:** We still have somebody else to introduce, too. |
**Brian Ketelsen:** Oh, okay... Sorry. |
**Erik St. Martin:** So our special guest today is the king of [Gobot](https://gobot.io/), [Ron Evans](https://twitter.com/deadprogram)... Making hardware come alive with Go. |
**Ron Evans:** Hey, everybody. |
**Erik St. Martin:** We've been in love with your stuff since back in 2013-2014, Brian? |
**Brian Ketelsen:** Yeah, 2014. I think so. |
**Erik St. Martin:** Well, he spoke at the conference, but I know we ran into it before then. I'm trying to think of when we first started playing. Why don't you give a brief intro to yourself and the Gobot project first, and we'll kind of jump in and talk hardware in Go? |
**Ron Evans:** Sure. I'm Ron Evans, a.k.a. DeadProgram on all the places that matter - GitHub, Twitter etc. I'm the ring leader of the Hybrid Group. We're a software consultancy that specializes in writing software for hardware companies. So if I have more hardware than normal people, it's because I'm supposed to, I gu... |
I tell people, "If you need some gear, just show up at my house with a box and something with wheels, like a dolly. Anyway, I've been doing open source software for hardware very actively since about 2008. I had done hardware-oriented software before that, but it was not open source related. |
It was in 2008 that I discovered a project called Ruby Arduino Development, from Greg Borenstein. It wasn't actually running Ruby on Arduinos, it was the somewhat forward-thinking idea of using Ruby to create a domain-specific language which you could then compile down to Arduino code and run independently. I created a... |
\[04:05\] So I created several different frameworks in different languages based on the same sort of ideas. I loved this idea of Go conceptually... I think it was Eleanor McHugh who was the first person who ever actually showed me any Go code with a lightning talk she did at a RubyConf in New Orleans, many years ago. T... |
In my case, anytime I check out a language, my first language is "Can I make it fly?" I mean, under its own power and land, successfully... Not just launch it into the air, although I am known to do that occasionally, but not on purpose, necessarily. |
**Brian Ketelsen:** So that's your turing test? |
**Ron Evans:** Yeah, exactly. We have what we call a conference-ready pilot. That means you can actually fly a drone as part of a conference demo, so you have to fly a little area of obstacle course first, or else you're not conference-rated. |
Anyway, I started playing with Go and started playing around with this idea that we ended up calling Gobot, and the first real public introduction was there at the first GopherCon. The work that I had been doing in Ruby with something called R2 was getting a bit of attention with a few people in that community. But it ... |
Luckily, other more experienced gophers took pity upon my code, in particular Matt Aimonetti and Jeremy Sands sat down and helped. So the Gobot of today - which we just released version 1.2 relatively recently - has been significantly rewritten, like many Golang projects have, as all of us are -- I mean, I still feel l... |
I was discussing that at lunch with Matt Aimonetti - that's really the beauty of using a language that is so deceptively simple. |
**Erik St. Martin:** You know, one of the things that I loved the most was -- the very first GopherCon [Rob Pike](https://twitter.com/rob_pike) did a keynote and he talked about how Go wasn't targeted for or wasn't used for embedded stuff, and then later you were showing it doing robotic stuff... |
**Ron Evans:** The next day, yes. |
**Erik St. Martin:** It was awesome. |
**Brian Ketelsen:** Yeah, and the part that trumped that was when he sat down and started helping you reorganize the codebase on our community hack day, the last day of GopherCon... What you need to do is make an interface and put that over here. |
**Ron Evans:** My palms were sweating, okay? He was like, "Don't be nervous, I don't bite." He's a very nice man. I was like, "Can I get you some coffee, Mr. Pike Sir?" \[laughter\] \[unintelligible 00:07:32.29\] he's like, "Are you like a Python or a Ruby programmer?" I'm like, "Yeah, you got me..." He's like, "You do... |
\[07:48\] He was very kind, and that's one thing about the Golang community in general - even when people are explaining how you could do it better, the general ethic, the cultural continuity of us helping each other out and doing so in a fun way... Kindness is really the term. And it still is a relatively small commun... |
We've been fortunate that the community has really embraced Gobot and helped us evolve to the... Just earlier today we hit 2,800 stars on GitHub, we have over 60 contributors, we have a lot of active work being done, having new hardware and software platforms, compatibility with different hardware that's coming out or ... |
**Erik St. Martin:** So here's a question... As you mentioned, you've got R2 which is in Ruby, and then you've got - I think it was Cylon.js, the JavaScript version... How does it contrast with those - community involvement and the scope or usage of the project? |
**Ron Evans:** They all use the same core set of underlying design patterns. It's very much like Sinatra in Ruby was the progenitor of Express.js in Node and Flask in Python, and Noir in Clojure. Every language implemented the same set of patterns for doing RESTful style API definitions. So the contribution that's inte... |
So we started it with Ruby with R2. Not to long thereafter we got impatient and we couldn't wait for people to copy it and we just decided we'll copy ourselves, so we created Cylon.js and then shortly thereafter Gobot. So the core design patterns may be the same, but the actual implementations are very much intended to... |
The implementations are very much idiomatic with regard to the implementation patterns, but the net effect is that you're using the same application development patterns. We might think of it as a sort of software factory for building hardware-oriented applications. It's like \[unintelligible 00:12:03.22\] hardware-ori... |
\[12:10\] The Ruby community sort of stalled a little, because a lot of Rubyist these days are more interested in building web applications than anything else, and also the implementations of the runtime, the things that we needed to do as far as concurrency was concerned, really we could do them best with jRuby or wit... |
With Node, we can take advantage of the way that Node handles blocking I/O, but we're also limited by the way that Node handles blocking I/O. Node is a hack. It's a useful hack, because most of the time the applications you're writing, your problem in life is blocking I/O. If you're writing web servers, your problem in... |
I did a talk a couple of weeks ago at FOSDEM in Brussels, which is an amazing conference, by the way... It's completely community-organized, so it's sort of a controlled chaos of a delightful kind. There was a fantastic community room for Go. [Francesc Campoy](https://twitter.com/francesc) was there and did a really gr... |
I'm really excited about the prospects for Go's total domination of the internet of things and robotic development world, and here's why. The first one is Go's performance - Golang's team with 1.8, the fact that the garbage collection's worst stop the world time is now one hundred microseconds, with a more typical aver... |
The second is concurrency - the Go programmer embraces the concurrency model of Go and is able to benefit from it enormously. The fact that Go can take advantage of all the cores on the multi-core machine and many of the new system on chip single board connected device platforms, R multi-core processors - particularly ... |
There's a part of my weekly activities - I regularly program in C++, Python, JavaScript and Go, in the same week. That's kind of weird. But the abilities you have to create concurrent code in Go with relatively little effort, when your needs coordinate the interaction between multiple hardware devices in near real-time... |
When you look at the amount of effort it takes to do that in other languages, even C++ with all the different dynamically-linked libs, the fact that things are statically linked in Golang - this is really the triumvirate of core capabilities you need to do device-oriented programming. So if the Go team themselves didn'... |
**Carlisia Thompson:** \[16:09\] It's delightful to hear that Go is working so well for hardware, because hardware is hard... There's so many things... I have such bad luck with hardware - whenever I touch it, the thing (whatever it is) breaks. As delightful as it is, I wanted to ask what do you see as opportunities fo... |
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