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IoT Virtual Conference Part 1
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Nov 9, 2023
Welcome everyone to the IoT Virtual Conference 2021 organized by C# Corner. This is a full day event featuring several top industry experts and Microsoft MVPs. We're excited to have you here. • 07:00 AM - 07:10 AM : Welcome Note Stephen SIMON • 07:10 AM - 08:00 AM : From data to AI on the edge Henk Boelman • 08:00 AM - 08:50 AM : Smart labeling classification datasets mixing machine learning with deep learning, using ML.NET Daniel Costea • 08:50 AM - 09:40 AM : OnBoarding and Controlling IoT Devices Telemetry Data Using Azure IoT Vithal Wadje • 09:40 AM - 10: 30 AM : Keynote Allen O'neill • 10:30 AM - 11:20 AM : Handy and the Big Picture Clifford Agius
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0:00
air pressure, proximity to other phones, gyroscopes, ambient temperature, accelerometer
0:05
There's a huge amount of inbuilt sensors inside in a phone before we even start talking about
0:11
anything that's very specific and doing one specific thing. And in addition to what's in
0:15
the phone, the next question then is how do those things relate to the world around us
0:20
And if we look at this picture here, we can see things like our phone while we get into a car
0:26
and our phone can connect to the Bluetooth speaker in the car
0:31
We go into our place of work and maybe we use our phone to
0:36
I've got a thing on the back of my phone and it's a, when I go into the office, when I'm allowed to go into the office
0:42
I do a little touchpad against the end of the access door
0:48
and it lets me in and out and it knows that I'm there. we have fridges that refrigerators that store our food that we can watch for the food that's
0:59
going in and out we can scan the barcodes of stuff the food that's going in and out or
1:05
we can look even at the shape of the stuff and do image recognition of what's going in and out and
1:10
it can tell us to make sure that we don't let stuff go out of date and we eat it etc etc so
1:15
So all of these different things, these are all sensors that are part of the world of IoT
1:22
And the message here is that it's all around us. So even though we think that we aren't affected by it, it is actually everywhere
1:30
And it's growing and it's getting even bigger. So what I'd like to do now is I'd like to introduce our two guests
1:38
And we're going to have a panel discussion. We're going to talk to Pete and to Cliff
1:44
Interestingly, Pete is there with his headphones on in that picture. And I would expect Cliff, who is also a pilot, to be wearing his headphones in the picture underneath
1:54
So the agenda that we're going to talk about is we're going to talk about IoT for good
1:59
Both guys have some interesting stories to tell about that. And I think Cliff is going to be talking about it in particular later on
2:06
We're going to be talking about IoT edge computing. What is edge computing
2:10
And what is this new thing called Azure Percept? We're going to talk about co-bots or co-robotics
2:17
We're going to talk about this strange thing called digital twins and how it works and interacts with IoT
2:24
And then finally, we're going to talk about a topic that's incredibly important with IoT, and that's ethics
2:30
So we're going to talk about killer robots, and we're going to talk about data privacy
2:35
So Simon, if you want to let the chaps into the conversation there now
2:40
um so uh pete do you want to give a quick introduction to yourself i can't do a quick
2:46
introduction to myself i'll be good at that so i recall years ago one of the um i was doing a a
2:55
pitch for an investment fund and they always try and sort of say do your elevator pitch right
2:59
but these guys actually made it even worse and they say give us your elevator pitch in a tweet
3:05
So they made us do it in 120 characters or whatever all the time. So you have 60 seconds, which you just have, Peter
3:11
and what you're doing in IoT. Yeah, I'm a freelance software developer, an IoT specialist mainly
3:18
That's where I tend to concentrate, although today I've been working on creating little mini games
3:22
for a client in Vue and JavaScript. So it really depends on what people want to pay me to do
3:27
But I'm an Azure MVP, Microsoft Azure MVP, Microsoft Certified Trainer, Pluralsight Author
3:33
uh stem ambassador code club organizer um and i'm pretty sure i'll meetup organizer not say
3:40
and dotnet knots and i'm in a podcast and geez i have 60 seconds already or what
3:46
so it it's it's like one of those things where you say well um uh tick any of these boxes that
3:53
you don't do right yes that's what i need to do yeah just one box cliff tell us where you're at
4:00
Me, my day job is an airline pilot for a major UK airline
4:05
So I get to fly Boeing 787s around the world, which is hence the picture you looked at earlier of me
4:11
When I'm not at 40,000 feet doing 600 miles an hour, you'll find me huddled over my computer
4:16
thrashing out even some .NET codes, be that Xamarin or IoT. I kind of tend to try and stick to the Xamarin IoT space
4:24
is where I'm at as a .NET developer. So I work on various projects with different clients
4:30
you know, kind of excited about Maui, coming along in .NET 6. Later on, I think directly after this one
4:37
I'm going to give a talk about Handier the Hands. It's a 3D printed prosthetic hand that I've helped build
4:42
And also on a Tuesday night, Pete forgot to say, we do have a Twitch stream
4:48
He left it off his list. On a Tuesday evening, 9pm UK time
4:52
you can work out your time zone where you are in the world. But we have a, on Azure Live
4:56
we have an IoT stream for an hour every Tuesday night where we talk about the latest and greatest things
5:01
that are coming into IoT and try and break them down into simpleton terms
5:05
that even I can understand. Awesome. And to raise you, Alan, on your workshop
5:10
on building a boat, I've got two 3D printers and I'm building an airplane. So, you know, I'll take your boat
5:17
and I'll raise you one plane. Oh, my God. Okay. It's actually, it's one of my minor dreams
5:24
to build an airplane as well, but I don't think I'd be able to fit it
5:29
into my workshop. That would require... Are you talking about now tree-building
5:34
Are you talking about a remote plane or a... No, no. It's a four-seater sling TSI
5:42
The kit comes from South Africa, from Joburg. And, yeah, they send you the kit
5:47
and you, yeah, build it. Oh, my God. I think I can even see the rivet gun there
5:52
just beside you. Is that your rivet gun? That's a dimple machine
5:57
So the metal is flat and where the holes are, you dimple it
6:01
So the rivet head's sitting in the top and you get a cleaner airflow
6:05
So you don't get any parasite drag, which is a drag caused by rivets and things sticking out into the airflow
6:11
Okay. We're here to talk about IoT. I'm going to drag you on to my after code show to talk about that particular project
6:19
I've guaranteed it. Yeah. Okay. So the first thing that we have on the agenda here, guys, is to talk about IoT for good
6:25
And, you know, we've seen IoT, it's ubiquitous everywhere, everything from production lines to aircraft to cars
6:38
I mean, there's more sensors than you can shake a stick at no matter where we go
6:43
But in particular, we're interested in IoT for good. And Cliff, you have been doing that directly with the prosthetic work that you do
6:52
I know you're going to talk about it in detail when you do your session after this, but can you give us a small overview of the project that you have there and how you got involved in it
7:06
I got involved because family friends of ours, their son Caden was born without a left forearm
7:16
and he's lived with a prosthetic limb. You can see here he has a slightly different version of this that he given by the NHS It effectively just a hook on the ends And there a story about a team of 3D printing prosthetic arms and limbs And his mum said could you help
7:36
I had a 3D printer, so I started out helping. But then I started to think, well, even that is much the same
7:40
It's still effectively, you pull that this is actual fishing line, 100-pound fishing line, and you pull across that
7:49
she moves your shoulder and it opens and closes the hook. The ones that they're 3D printing is much the same fishing line
7:54
move your shoulder and it opens and closes the hand um and i thought we could do better and i
7:59
like iot and electronics so we sort of took a design from a group called open bionics that
8:05
was open source at the time and adapted that and made it so that we can actually build it cheaper
8:09
and 3d print the parts and it's got um some adafruit boards inside um it's got some actronics
8:17
little 20 millimeter linear actuators in there and um and yeah and it moves and sort of works
8:23
such that Caden now has an arm that he can control. And with his muscles, he can control
8:29
When you say it was open source at the time, has that changed
8:34
Yes, they went closed source, which I was annoyed at the beginning
8:39
but I believe now talking with various different people, none of the team will reply to my emails, even though I've tried to reach out to them
8:45
It's just kind of sad, but I believe they went closed source
8:49
because they were aiming to try and get approval for the NHS National Health Service
8:53
here in the UK and across in Germany and France as well
8:57
So I believe they've gone close to us. They've turned it into a business
9:01
And, you know, yeah, it's one of those things. You know, I can't complain about it
9:05
They've left their designs as were up on GitHub, but they're three, four years old now
9:10
And I'll talk more about it if you come along to my talk, but what, in 35-ish minutes, you can hear a bit more about it
9:17
But, yeah, it's a great Caden use it day in, day out. And the good thing is he wants to be a chef
9:21
so when he's at college he can't hold a tomato an apple around thing with a hook it just doesn't
9:26
work whereas now he's got hands he can just like we can he can grip around a tomato an apple and
9:33
he can slash up and also he can't cut himself so he'll never be wearing those blue plasters to uh
9:38
you know but yeah and then there's a mobile app uh written in xamarin um which allows him to
9:46
control the hands and also change the settings. And, you know, as his muscles get stronger and weaker
9:55
he can set the settings for how the hand works and change the grips that are in there and things like this
10:00
But as I say, in 30 minutes' time, we'll come along to my talk and learn a bit more. Excellent
10:05
Pete, have you come across any IoT for good? Have you done any yourself
10:08
Any insight there you want to share? Oh, absolutely. Come across. We had Sarah Mastin at my meetup, Notts IoT, just recently
10:16
She's involved with Project 15, which is a Microsoft IoT for Good project where they're psychology based IoT
10:27
So they're looking at how they can fix all the problems around ecology, which was fantastic
10:33
And while I was arranging that, we managed to find a BBC article where Whipsnade Zoo were looking at taking what they called selfies of elephants
10:44
so they could train AI models to help with human elephant conflicts which you think are people going
10:53
and poaching elephants that's not what they meant at all what they mean is that if you've got a farm
10:57
somewhere in Africa then potentially elephants could come in and trample on that and possibly
11:02
even the people that are working at the farm so you know there are what they would call conflicts
11:06
that happen in those particular and then both humans and elephants can get hurt during that
11:10
so they want to deploy out this machine learning models out into Africa to help that
11:16
They managed to get Alistair Davies, I think his last name is, to come on and speak about the stuff that he was doing
11:23
And he was also, he put IoT in plastic bottles and set them afloat in the ocean
11:28
to see where this plastic that is a horrible scourge across the world at the moment
11:35
to see where that goes. so those two projects that they were speaking about were fantastic and in fact the good thing
11:42
about the project 15 one is it's all open source and you can deploy the whole of the that iot
11:47
infrastructure yourself and obviously there's no point going into a great deal of detail but
11:52
obviously if you look at it from a microsoft point of view you've got quite a lot of
11:56
services that you need to string together to get a full iot solution to work if you want to use
12:02
all of the bits. So you've got time series, insights, streaming ytics
12:06
and storage, and an IoT hub, and endpoints, and all of that routing, and logic apps
12:11
and flow, and digital twins that we'll come onto in a bit. And they've just got an ARM template that you spin up
12:17
and put some bits into, and it configures all of that for you. And so the reason why they did that is to make it easy
12:24
for people to grab all of that powerful IoT tech and then use it, because it's complicated
12:32
to do this sort of stuff so the easier you can make it the better yeah so yeah it's very interesting
12:37
that um uh you know you you touched on there that it's not just the uh the the device itself
12:45
but it's all of the other things that surround the device um which brings us on to um this this
12:52
concept of edge computing and um uh i never fully understood until you know recently what they really
13:01
meant about this by this edge computing um and iot on the edge and it seems at times that uh
13:09
um there's people at companies like microsoft and google and ibm and everything else and they're
13:17
just paid to think up these you know random words and stuff and slip them together and you know then
13:22
build some marketing around them and then they come down to engineers and they say make something
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that does this thing you know and uh uh you know uh so iot edge computing um it conjures up uh
13:38
things of i don't know um something that's out on the the edge of the arctic and it's it's uh like
13:46
not meant to be touched or it's um maybe on the far flung reaches of a farm and sheep farm in
13:53
Australia or something. But in actual fact, it means anything that is, you know, sort of the last
14:01
step before it's touching the environment, as it were, you know. And it seems that there's a huge
14:09
amount of issues in relation to edge computing and not only allowing whatever the device it is
14:18
to do its job but then getting the data that it collects back up to wherever this this place that
14:27
does something with that um there is the the question of uh when you go and you have this
14:35
this small device out on the edge is it able to do everything that it needs to do or do we actually
14:42
need to take that data and send it back up to some big processing Goliath center somewhere that does
14:50
some big magic AI and then sends some result back down So it not just about the individual device it the whole ecosystem of everything that around this So when you looking at projects Pete that customers might come to you with
15:11
do you generally look at sort of the device first? Do you look at the back end first
15:17
How do you get this synergy of stuff coming together? It can be quite difficult, actually, depending on the client. If you get a reasonably technical
15:27
client, that job's somewhat easier. But finding a delineation between what they think they want and
15:34
what they actually want sometimes can be where you need to go. And you can often scare clients
15:39
I mean, I'm freelance, I'm a consultant, so I have to be a little bit careful. So I can't just fling
15:45
a whole heap of stuff at somebody and tell them how much it's going to cost because they'll likely
15:50
to go, don't we want all of that stuff? We're too scared. We'll probably go and do it ourselves
15:53
or we'll get somebody else to do it. So you've got to, there's a fair bit of holding back
15:57
But I mean, a good example is a client I've just had recently where they have got, they're technical
16:04
quite technical, but they know nothing about the cloud. But they came to me and they've got these little sensors
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BLE sensors that do temperature and humidity and light level, much to Cliff's disgust
16:14
He hates ocean, to be particular, or two of them at least. And they knew how to create this tiny little dumb sensor
16:21
Not dumb, actually. It's pretty clever, but it just sits there broadcasting out these three readings
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But they had no way of grabbing that data and doing something with it
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Now, when they showed me what they had, which was like a little Python script that would run on a PC, just grabbing Bluetooth data
16:40
And they said, right, we want to put these into buildings and look how they warm up and cool down
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and we've got, you know, we want to put hundreds of them in the building and we'll need little gateways perhaps to grab the data
16:50
I immediately thought of putting it in the cloud because, you know
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that's my background. But that's not how they led. They had a little server on site that they wanted that data delivering to
17:04
and then a university would dial into that and they had like Firebird as a database or something
17:09
so all they wanted was for me to grab the data from the BLE sensors and send it to that
17:15
and of course as a consultant then you do what the client wants and you absolutely
17:21
you know advise them of the other things they could do but they had no requirement for the
17:25
cloud side whatsoever but of course I knew that that would come anyway that's always interesting
17:31
It's that particular tension between what you know is possible and what could bring value to something
17:46
And then what the customer says, well, I don't need that stuff
17:50
I know it's cool and I know it's interesting, but we only need a ladder
17:57
We don't need the Rolls-Royce. Thank you very much. even though we know that the rolls royce in this case because it is um rented out by the cpu
18:07
and is only going to cost us one p a day we're still going to buy that box and put it in the
18:12
corner even though it's going to cost us four grand because that's what we know that's true
18:17
what's what's i mean there's a few benefits here obviously um having a background in iot
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it's faster for someone like myself to spin up a proof of concept of POC
18:28
Once you get it to a certain point and they're happy and you've done the job
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or you've nearly done the job, then I tend to knock up a little POC in my own time
18:38
I don't charge anybody for this of what it could look like because that's the other delineation there is that if you don't understand
18:45
certainly how the cloud side works, it's really difficult to see what the benefits are
18:50
And you kind of said that about edge as well. Until you understand what the benefits are, sort of almost in a concrete way, it's quite difficult to picture what the value is
18:59
So one of the things I use quite regularly from a consultancy point of view is IoT Central, which is a Microsoft Software as a Service offering that bundles up a lot of the complicated stuff, IoT hubs, streaming ytics, time series insights, storage, device provisioning service
19:17
All of those different things are bundled up into a package that you don't have to manage
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and what's beautiful from a consultancy point of view is that you can develop a solution in that
19:25
and just give it to the client and they can manage the parts they need to manage and Microsoft
19:30
manages everything else essentially so I lean on that quite heavily although you know if you were
19:36
to look at my portfolio of stuff if two-thirds of it is IoT central that might just make it look like
19:41
I'm dumbing it down but really it does give you that a little bit like Project 15 but you know
19:48
a far more delivered, developed effort. Clifford, you talked earlier on about the fact that in general
19:56
you like to, for example, your IoT tends to go hand-in-hand, to excuse the pun behind, tends to go hand-in-hand with your Xamarin stuff
20:10
And that again shows that the ecosystem and it talks directly to the ubiquity of phones in the whole IoT space
20:21
Do you want to talk to that a bit from the point of view of edge computing? Yeah, I mean, Pete said that he's more kind of cloud orientated
20:31
I'm more sort of down and dirty in the electronics. I like getting in there with a soldering iron and building circuits up
20:38
I know Pete does that as well, but that's where I'm happy. Depends who you ask, doesn't it
20:44
so um you know that's where i'm happiest is building electronics and playing around and
20:49
trying to work out a circuit design or what parts can bar off the shelf to build up a circuit
20:54
um a lot of the projects i do with client um you know involve around bluetooth um things and then
21:01
you can use a xamarin app quite simply um because your phone has got bluetooth to connect those
21:06
devices and uh take control of them or just checking on them or the sensors etc so i'm
21:12
currently working on a project which is aviation related and that is going to
21:19
use a device that's going to be in an aircraft but it's going to use a phone
21:24
set up that device and control it and do the management of the device and then
21:31
when you walk away and it hasn't got a Bluetooth connection that Bluetooth sensor you know turns off and the device runs with those settings until next time
21:40
you come along and you want to change the settings, you'll connect to it again, you'll
21:44
change the settings and walk away. But you can do all that. So rather than having to
21:48
take the device from where it is or taking a big laptop and plugging it in and things
21:53
you know, I've spent many years in the car industry to change settings of anything. You
21:57
have to take a laptop with a special controller card and a sort of big rucksack with it all
22:02
in and go along just to plug into a robot to change a couple of settings or plug into
22:06
one of the machine tools and adjust something. Whereas now you can just pop along with any mobile phone
22:12
you know, Android, iOS, it really doesn't matter. And just sort of, you know, connect it wirelessly
22:18
via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth and just change the settings. You know, I've worked on projects where
22:23
you know, you talk about the edge. For me it stuff that kind of right out there that doesn have a connection So it you know effectively you putting a mobile phone like 4G SIM inside the device or you using LoRaWAN to connect to something that can eventually connect to the clouds or the Internet which can then connect to the cloud
22:42
So for me, it's something way out in the distance that's, you know, sort of really low power on a battery or solar cell, you know, and it's got a weak signal
22:51
But you need to amplify that to get up to the cloud. That's really interesting when we sit on top of what we started off talking about there, which is the IoT for good
23:02
I was writing an article for a client last year at some stage, and it discussed lower one and it discussed remote gateways
23:14
And in particular, it was interested in things like out in maybe developing countries where there was issues with wells
23:26
And if people had to go to a well that was so many miles away to get water on a daily basis, usually it fell down to the female and kids to do it
23:38
And they were the drunkies, unfortunately. but when they get there it could be that the well was dry
23:46
or it was half empty or they needed a longer rope to get down
23:49
or whatever so it was discussed that potentially they would have sensors that would be
23:56
solar powered lower down in there would be able to measure the quality of the water
24:02
alert them before they went to one that they should go to another one etc etc
24:06
and it would help to improve the quality of life and ultimately as you had flagged there it was all about stuff that was really on the extreme
24:16
edge it was really out there it was nowhere from civilization it certainly didn't have the
24:22
the fiber broadband that you know we we boast about having so many you know gigs per second
24:29
up down and everything else well these things aren't measuring gigs they're they're they're
24:33
measured in bytes per minute almost. It's really bad, you know. So it was very interesting to hear
24:41
you talk about that. I also found it interesting that you're in the aviation business. And of
24:50
course, aircraft are the ultimate things on the edge, aren't they? Because they fly up and they're
24:57
out there. And it's my understanding that certainly commercial aircraft can gather gigabytes
25:03
of information from the time they take off to the time they land and then when they land that's
25:07
downloaded or whatever um i'm interested in general aviation i.e small aircraft um and uh
25:16
again when lockdown finishes i'm hoping i can get back in and go towards getting my private license
25:23
and everything else um one of the interesting things that i'm a guy sort of understood um is
25:30
that in general aviation there isn't all of the advanced electronics and advanced stuff on the edge
25:35
that you have in in commercial um and i was amazed to find out that an actual fact uh when you're
25:43
coming into a a a rural or a um a a non-commercial airport uh frequently because there's no tower
25:53
there's nobody there to tell you where to land you're literally looking out the window trying to
25:59
see if there's anybody else there coming into land you're going to hit or whatever before you
26:03
go down. And that's only recently that even collision detection systems that started out
26:12
also, fascinatingly enough, as an open source project for general aviation aircraft and are
26:19
similar types of things that have started out as open source for autonomous vehicles. So we're
26:26
seeing all of this stuff that happens out on the edge that may or may not get brought back into
26:33
commercialization. But nonetheless, it seems to have its genus right on the edge before it's
26:43
brought back in. One of the things that we start off and we talk about computing on the edge and
26:52
devices on the edge. But one of the things that always seems to be forgotten about
26:58
and tacked on at the end is security. And it's the ease of authentication
27:04
And we've seen people doing proof of concepts where they were able to hack into cars that were being driven remotely
27:15
that have been able to take over a car and pull it into the side
27:19
or get it to speed up or slow down or whatever. I know that I read there last year about some proof of concept attacks on aircraft, which are kind of scary
27:30
And then I came across recently Azure Percept, which aims to bring in this concept of, okay, you have your device and you want to do your stuff out on the edge
27:46
but have you thought about the whole thing about authentication and about device management and
27:52
about the software update and about importantly the security of it etc and well if you haven't
27:58
here's a kind of a package that you can build around your stuff that allows you just to
28:03
plug it in and you it takes away that headache and forgets about it have you guys come across
28:09
percept yet or have you any um experience of um having to secure your devices on the edge
28:16
have we come across percept yet cliff we we well there's none available in the uk so we can't play
28:22
with one here in the uk sadly well i i did i ordered one last night and yeah the usual i ordered
28:29
it through a a virtual us address yeah there's a treat yeah that's a trick that's what we've missed
28:35
Pete that's what we've missed um for security um I kind of you know I don't trust any IOT device
28:43
um for security so bluetooth data that comes from the device I treat it just like you would a web
28:48
page um you know you never trust the the browser user's browser do you when the data comes back
28:53
and they're filled in a long form and it gets back up to server you do server-side validation as well
28:57
as client side um I treat IOT devices when the data comes back to where I want to process it be
29:02
a mobile phone or back in the cloud. I treat them all the same. I don't trust the data because you don't know what's happening to it in transit
29:10
You know, Bluetooth is notoriously difficult to secure. You know, Wi-Fi a little bit better
29:16
LoRaWAN, you know, much like Wi-Fi, you can secure it a bit better. But it's, you know, it's insecure because you're transmitting it via a medium
29:25
which isn't, you know, HTTPS and all the other gubbings that go with. So I just don't trust the data
29:30
And that's the way I think of it mentally, which means that I make sure that whatever data I am sending
29:35
is the bare minimum. And, you know, I'm trying to obfuscate it some way as well
29:41
when I'm sending it. So that's how I do it. The percept is really interesting
29:46
I'm, you know, very eager to play with one and see what we can do with it
29:50
Me and Pete have talked about it quite a few times, haven't we, Pete? So it'd be nice to get one and have a play
29:55
Yeah, we are working on it. Yeah. We can say that, can't we? We're working
29:59
Tell us about, tell us, Pete, about co-bots. What's a co-bot? Well, co-bot, co-robotics, do you mean
30:07
Yep. Like remote controlling robots. Is that sort of where you want to go with that
30:12
Kind of, yeah. It's sort of, I've heard before when people talk about robots and one of the things that we have here, Ethan, Dan
30:18
that we can kind of blend into from this is, you know, killer robots and Schwarzenegger's thing coming along
30:24
and all that stuff and Skynet and everything else. and you know people think of robots and they think oh the killer robot and the robot gonna
30:34
take our job and everything else and when i talk about ai and i always say look we're not interested
30:40
in replacing the human we're interested in augmenting the human yeah and it's critically
30:46
important to to to keep that sort of at the top of the conversation and co-bots and co-robotics
30:55
in the context of what we're discussing here is where we have robots that work with people
31:04
So for example, let's take a healthcare scenario whereby we have a robot
31:16
That's not something like, you know, people think robot and they just think, they think the hand that we see behind Cliff there, right
31:23
They think the humanoid thing, right? they generally don't the first picture that comes to their mind is usually humanoid and and killers
31:30
and laser eyes and stuff and it's yeah it's generally not um oh it's a thing with four
31:36
wheels that scurries along the ground at two miles an hour trying to avoid everything looking stupid
31:41
most of the time right um so a cobot we could think of it as um something that uh uh maybe
31:48
goes into um uh comes alongside a patient's bed and is nothing more than a thing on on three wheels
31:57
or two wheels that says take your medicine now here's your your three tablets to take type of
32:01
thing and it takes the the um the effort away from the human or maybe it's monitoring maybe it's a
32:09
um a bed that we already have an actual fact for um people who are heavily immobile um that helps
32:16
to turn the patient, this type of stuff. So co-robotics in this kind of thing
32:23
is certainly becoming much more prevalent. If you think also, a classic example
32:31
that does almost edge into the killer robot thing is, have you heard, I'm sure you have
32:38
of these harnesses that people who do manual work can step into and they help them to lift things right yeah very much like an alien there's a scene
32:50
in there it might be alien yeah i think it's alien too isn't it it's an exoskeleton yeah exactly that
32:57
yeah it's quite clever really yeah yeah so if you think you think of co-robotics you know autopilot
33:02
on an aircraft is effectively a co-robotic is flying the plane for us so we can deal with you
33:07
know rather than being pilots we're systems administrators now we step back and you know
33:13
know the plane flies itself you know we do the takeoff and put the autopilot in you know 10 000
33:18
feet and the plane flies itself and we're just managing it and telling it okay go left go right
33:21
or follow the flight track um you know and we're managing the system so you know that's kind of
33:27
co-robotics um you never get i don't think you're never going to get a commercial aircraft flying
33:33
with passengers and no pilots because well we don't have a car that can drive itself along the
33:37
road at the moment with no drivers so you've got a third dimension at least in the car it can stop
33:42
if it's got a problem. The computer has a blue screen of death moment
33:47
It can just stop and everyone gets out and say, oh, well, the car's broken down. I call a tow truck
33:51
You can't really do that at 40,000 feet. It's not going to work
33:55
But that, for me, is kind of co-robotics. Passengers, if you look to the left
33:59
we're approaching the Azure cloud. If you please disembark. One of you, press control, alt, delete, please
34:11
Absolutely. So let's get on now to digital twins, right? So Cliff, we were talking about the absolute sheer tsunami of data that is generated in an aircraft when it flies, especially a commercial aircraft
34:31
And even the complexity of something like the aircraft engine to say nothing about the navigations
34:39
One of the things that I've long known about aircraft and flying aircraft is that there's so much redundancy built in, much redundancy of systems
34:51
And to me, digital twins allows us to sort of be able to see how things could be modeled and how they could go wrong and how they are going
35:02
even while the aircraft is away if we look at the edge devices
35:09
that are off out on the edge that because they're on low RAN
35:14
and the data communications is very unreliable and we don't get the data in for a couple of days
35:21
we can still get an estimate of how it is by mirroring the stuff in twins
35:26
do you guys want to give an explanation of digital twins and how it relates to IoT maybe
35:32
in one minute who wants to take that on go on pete you're the expert yeah digital twins are a well
35:39
i kind of alluded to in the title a digital representation of something uh potentially in
35:44
the real world but not necessarily but it can be anything from a small device uh to a human you can
35:50
you can make a digital twin of a human and in fact if you watched uh the nvidia gtc conference uh
35:56
nvidia got a large plan to to make digital twins of pretty much everything they can in the in the
36:01
the real world, which if you can do something like that, it's fantastic. But one of the real
36:07
powers of digital twins you just mentioned there a second, where you can use them for modeling
36:12
And I heard a really great story about one of the early adopters of digital twins before there was
36:16
such a term even, were Formula One teams, where they model everything down to even the thickness
36:22
and gauge of a wire so that they can try reducing a wire and seeing what the results of the rest of
36:28
the system which is a massively complicated uh machine and you're talking about another machine
36:33
that's got sensors producing gigabytes of data i bet formula one team probably produces more data
36:37
on their car on one race than than you would in five days worth of flying on a plane that's it's
36:43
that much data so it's a lot they they probably have sensors on more of a the car than you would
36:49
on a plane even um planes big enough that you probably don't have as many sensors
36:54
I don't know, I'm just guessing I know that the aircraft that I fly to 787
37:01
has two Rolls-Royce engines and the data they produce is sent directly back
37:07
to Rolls-Royce and also back to the airline that I work for and they can see problems with the engine
37:13
way before we would see them as pilots sitting at the point end of the jet and
37:18
I've landed and been met by engineers that have said okay we're just
37:23
going to take the aircraft so we see a problem starting to to occur with left engine there that we knew nothing about which been flying the thing for like 12 13 hours like yeah yeah we we can see it going to foul um you
37:36
know in a you know in a few sectors time so we're going to you know take it out of service now and
37:41
you know rectify the fault now you know so it means that they could they could plan the the time
37:47
of taking out of service to to you know because an airline you know aircraft to an airline is only
37:52
making money when it's in the sky on the ground it costs money um so they could see okay we'll
37:56
take out a service now get this pair affected why we've got a spare on the ground and no one knows
38:02
the passengers don't know that the aircraft has changed you know from one registration to another
38:06
registration underneath them but it all happened seamlessly because they could see that data
38:11
um you know i've been airborne where we had you know a technical problem with aircraft
38:14
i've been on sat phone back to back to uk and head office and spoke to engineers and they could
38:19
see live streams of data, a delay of about a minute between what we're seeing on the aircraft
38:24
and what they're seeing on computers. So again, they can see a digital representation of the
38:28
aircraft on the systems back in the UK. So, you know, that's kind of digital twins, you know
38:35
is a way of visualizing a live system or a system that's not currently connected to the network
38:42
You could, you know, update it, make changes, and then next time it connects, it will suck down
38:46
those changes in those new settings. Yeah. So let's move on now, finally, and talk about the wonderful world of ethics
38:59
I remember when I heard this years ago, when I was only interested in myself and my mates
39:08
and my music, I was going to go, you know, who cares? You know, who cares these ethics things
39:12
but then I think as you realise the world is not just about you suddenly
39:18
it becomes more important and the main thing again that comes into people's
39:27
head is stuff like killer robots but it's not just about killer robots and do we design
39:33
IoT devices that can go out as a drone and track somebody down
39:39
and kill them And it's about things like faith recognition. It's about things like data privacy of the data that we have
39:52
So, for example, if I take my Fitbit that's charging here and I'm gathering data on the person, what do I have to do to ensure that the data that comes off that IoT device isn't giving away some information that is going to be injurious to the person and that we protect the privacy
40:16
So there's a whole range of stuff there that causes an issue
40:21
Do you think from an engineering point of view that we need any kind of regulation around IoT ethics
40:33
Or is it something that should just be left up to the industry to self-regulate
40:39
You're muted, Cliff. I'm muted there. I think it's the same, the 2020-21, isn't it
40:47
I think at the moment the industry should should self-regulate and the reason I say that is because I think it'd be too
40:56
difficult for politicians and the legal beavers to come up with a way of regulating it and I think they'd get it wrong
41:03
so I think we should self-regulate and you know and the likes of you know the likes of Troy Hunts of the world that point out
41:11
and Scott Helms that point out all these security failures and you know
41:16
and where things have gone wrong. We need more of that. It needs to be shouted louder
41:21
the fact that when companies do get it wrong, and then it will mean that, you know, when clients come to me with our projects
41:26
you know, I'm less is more. If I don't need to collect the data, we don't need it, then why collect it
41:31
Don't collect it, don't store it, but we might need it later, but you don't need it now
41:35
So let's not collect it. Because then that way you've got, you know
41:39
always sort of work on a premise that even if I'm trying to store it securely
41:43
it's in the open. That way, what I'm storing can be seen by anyone
41:47
And it makes me feel better about the fact that the data I'm collecting. It's interesting when we talk about ethics, one of the things that we think about is data privacy and data security and are we collecting too much or too little
42:04
One of the things that we don't generally talk about is inclusion
42:08
and one of the reasons that inclusion is really important in ethics I think can be clearly
42:15
illustrated by one example. I recall being in the Science Museum in fact in London a couple
42:26
of years back and in one of the exhibitions that they had they had a little sort of a booth and
42:33
you would go in and you would stand up um and it would look at you and it was called um uh the
42:40
emoticon or something i don't know some silly name and but what it would do is it would zone in
42:45
and it would try and uh using you know cameras to automatically recognize um what is the gender of
42:52
the person who's standing in front of me and what emotion are they showing in their face and what
42:59
age are they um and uh you know what gender are they that type of stuff um and I I thought it was
43:07
cool and I wanted to go and see what it would make of me Santa Claus right and uh um I was kind of
43:15
queuing um you know the the 50 year old geek standing there of course and all of the everything
43:20
from six-year-olds up to their mums and dads and all lining up as well so um this this particular
43:27
young chap went in and it said that he was 11 or 12 and he went and it said you're happy and he went
43:34
and it says you're sad and that was awesome right um and uh this other um uh kid then went in um
43:44
and uh it didn't give anything it just kind of gave a there's nobody standing there response
43:51
and then his dad went in and kind of, you know, because the kid was going, what's going on
43:57
And his dad went in and stood in as well, and it gave a similar type of thing. And I suddenly clicked what was going on
44:04
The gentleman and his son were Sikhs, right? So they were both wearing turbans
44:10
And it completely threw out the algorithm because, number one, it had been clearly trained primarily on Caucasian individuals
44:28
And B, it had never been shown anybody who had a hat on, right
44:32
Irrelevant of whether it was a Sikh turban or the queen with one of her fancy hats or whatever
44:40
It's irrelevant. The fact is that that piece of IoT had been deployed without having done some kind of inclusivity testing
44:50
We still have that problem now too, don't we? Twitter AI algorithm for selecting the faces and images chooses Caucasian people over people of African descent and things like that Still I think today in fact which is a terrible thing for it to do
45:07
It just auto selects. And there's AI where people with dark skin against dark backgrounds just don't get shown as faces because there's not enough contrast between the background and the person's face
45:19
So there's some big problems. Absolutely. And you know what? those things are not technically insurmountable they're not even difficult problems right and
45:28
it's purely a case that they haven't got enough people with diversity in their training sets for
45:33
it to be actually lifted up as a problem you know and that's very unfortunate so okay we're going to
45:41
have to wind up now that's been a very interesting tour of what exactly is iot through for some
45:49
examples of iot being used for good um co-robots digital twins um we didn't quite touch on the
45:56
killer killer robots yet um but i will session for that well we we should actually um i saw a a twitter thing about 12 months ago and i just said oh my
46:09
god that's just the end um and it showed these guys who had put together a drone that was actually
46:16
flying around a working chainsaw, right? What could possibly go wrong, right
46:26
Yeah. So we leave it at that. Thank you very much indeed, guys
46:31
for helping us with this panel. And I know that we're going straight now to Cliff
46:38
So this is an absolutely fascinating concept. And I have to tune in to see this
46:43
So the very best of luck with that. Simon thank you for organizing and arranging
46:47
so we'll leave you to wind it up now alright so gentlemen
46:52
I believe you all enjoy your company looks like you really had some fun
46:55
and I also see the comments coming in people really enjoyed it
46:59
thank you so much for your time I know Cliff and Petty is going to come back
47:03
so we're going to take a five minutes break and then we'll be back with Cliff's session
47:09
so thanks Alan the other two gentlemen will see you again Thank you
48:13
Thank you
48:43
Thank you
49:13
Thank you
49:43
Thank you
50:13
All right. I hope you enjoyed that music and the panel that was previous
50:21
I really enjoyed that panel. And from that panel, we now move to our next session
50:26
And following now is Cliff. Cliff, I hope Clifford. I think his nickname is Cliff
50:33
I'm so confused. I'm going to ask him when I was there. So what an interesting background he has
50:38
He's a pilot. Oh, my goodness. He flies planes. that this fact is itself so interesting
50:44
So I won't take any more time. We're already in his session, almost like 10 minutes
50:48
So without any further ado, let's go ahead and invite our next speaker, Clifford
50:55
Oh, nevermind. Hi Clifford, welcome to the IT virtual conference, back
51:40
Hi, Simon. Yeah, back again. Yeah, Clifford when I'm in trouble. You start with Geordie accent, then I run for the hills because that's my wife and I know I'm really, really in trouble then
51:51
Okay. So you want to straight away go ahead and get started with your session? Is that what you want
51:56
Yeah, if you want to share my slides, I think. Okay, so everyone can see your screen now and rest is all your time
52:02
Excellent. Thank you. If you can give me a five minute warning, Simon, as well in the chat bit, that'd be fantastic. 100%
52:08
That's it. Excellent. This is, as Simon has already alluded in that great little intro
52:14
actually, I haven't seen that. I'm an airline pilot, as it said, for British Airways, so
52:18
I fly the 787s around the world. And when I'm not doing that, I work as a freelance.net
52:23
Xamarin IoT developer If you want to reach out to me you can see my Twitter handle and email address on the slide and it be on every slide from now on But I not here to talk about that I here to talk about how I helped a young lad with a 3D printed barnet can a little bit of IoT and a Xamarin mobile app
52:41
So if I, there you go. So as I say, my job is flying an aircraft around the world, and that's the flight deck of a Boeing 787
52:52
I'm not mentioning the fact I'm an airline pilot just on the shelf. Look at me. I'm an airline pilot as well as a coder
52:56
I can do what you do and more. It's not about that. I'm fairly dangerous as a developer
53:03
I'll come back to what I mentioned as being an airline pilot later on in my talk
53:07
but it is quite important to this project and where we see it going forward
53:11
Passions, coding, developing things, playing with electronics, IoT. I love learning new things
53:16
I'm all about learning, you know, on the learn platform of docs.microsoft.learn and supporting
53:23
others to learn as well. So I'm more than happy to come along to anyone's meetup group and talk
53:30
about either IoT, Xamarin, or even how to do team building and teamwork that I bring from the aviation
53:35
sector. But that's enough about me, as I say, let's move on. Let's talk about Caden
53:41
Young lads, he's 16 now, he's a little bit younger when we started this project. But as you can see
53:46
there an image, Caden was born with a limb deficiency, he was missing his left forearm
53:53
and you'll notice in the low of the picture in the centre there, on his right hand, the
53:59
hand it does have, he's missing his middle finger, so his pinky, his little finger and
54:04
his thumb, so he calls it his claw hand, because he kind of grips like a, sorry, crab hand
54:10
because he grips like a crab, and then he also has a prosthetic arm provided to him by
54:15
National Health Service, the NHS here in the UK, which is a wonderful, awesome part of the
54:21
government system, helping us get through this pandemic, which is amazing. But let's move on
54:27
and talk about what the NHS, the National Health Service do provide for Cade. You can see there, he's off to London 2012 Olympics. He's on the London Underground going along to the site
54:35
You can see his prosthetic arm there. So he would have been, what, eight or nine there
54:40
going off to London and that was his party trick was to click his arm on something
54:45
and step away from it and everyone looks boy his arm's just falling off
54:48
you can see there in detail the fact that it's just a claw
54:53
with a formed in that case fiberglass and sort of colored to look like
55:01
a human arm which Caden hated and we'll come with that in a little while
55:05
and then there's a bit of fishing line that goes across the back of his shoulders
55:09
to strap on his other shoulder and as he moves that shoulder in and out it opens and closes the
55:13
claw so very very basic you can see there in the lower picture you can see every year he goes along
55:20
to uh to uh the hospital sees um uh prosthetic surgeon and they take a cast of his of his arm
55:27
of the the part that he has and they make him a new arm um and but he keeps the claw up so every
55:33
year he gets a new one I've got the red one the photo the family of happily
55:38
loaned to me for my talks which is amazing every year since Cain's been
55:42
born unusual for him because when he was born he went into a group that were
55:47
looking into how to give prosthetics to children she was quite lucky to get into
55:50
this group so every year he gets a new arm from there downwards and the wrist
55:57
part unclips and he keeps that until he breaks it and then he gets a new one now
56:02
Now this arm costs the NHS, for them to produce it, costs anywhere between four and a half and six and a half thousand pounds
56:09
So they're not cheap to make. It also takes Caden out of school for two days
56:14
because he has to go along to be fitted and then go back to be checked
56:17
to make sure it works. You've got all the technicians and the time and money that goes into their time behind
56:23
The hook that goes in the end costs anywhere between two and a half and three and a half thousand pounds
56:27
And then it just has elastic bands here that pull it back together. that and you can see the fishing line, 100-pound fishing line, which the family use and replace
56:36
quite often when Caden breaks it. That's quite a dumb instrument. So we go back to my slides
56:43
Thank you, Simon. We look through it. Back in 2016, Christmas time in 2016, there was a news
56:50
article on the BBC News and Sky News here in the UK about a dad that printed a 3D printed prosthetic
56:56
hands um and you know back after the uh the school holidays my uh kids go to school with Hayden
57:03
um or did um they uh they you know his mum come up to me in the playground and said you know
57:09
Cliff have you seen the news about this dad's 3d printing hands yeah I have I have and she went
57:13
you got 3d prints haven't you and it's like yes yes yes I have uh and I realized instantly what
57:18
I'd fallen into that that trap uh where you kind of kind of offer yourself up to help but I was more
57:23
than happy to help so I went home um and you know fired up the browser and started looking around
57:28
but before we look at what we found let's see what Caden can do with his uh his current uh arm or
57:34
what he had before so uh if we just watch this hopefully you can hear the audio as well um not
57:40
that you need the audio it's just cups clinking together but Caden's uh quite adept at using his
57:45
his arm um that he has in his hook so you know he can make me a cup of tea when I go visit
57:50
he can even pick out a tea bag and make me a cup of tea and that's because Caden's used one since
57:58
birth and that's the reason I'll just move on from that so Caden's used one since birth
58:02
she's had many years and human body is amazing we can adapt to anything
58:07
so because of that he's adapted and he's used now but a lot of children that need a prosthetic limb
58:14
is because they've had either a life-changing injury or they've had an illness like say meningitis
58:20
or diabetes where they've had to have a limb amputated for various different reasons
58:27
So they've then suddenly got to try and learn to use a hook which they're not used to
58:32
The hooks are quite expensive for the NHS as I said earlier and every year that's an ongoing cost
58:36
for the National Health Service. But what if you're in a third world country? What if you're
58:41
in a part of the world where there isn't a national health service um what if you're you know in a part
58:46
of the world where you have to pay for your own insurance and they don't want to cover that that
58:50
cost that ongoing bill um for the child to have a limb um so you know what do you do then so i
58:56
thought myself well let's see if we can make kade an arm so we then looked at um looked at
59:02
where's my mouse gone there it is um we then looked at uh the hold on it's there it is uh we
59:12
then looked at the internet and uh the first thing we come across was the limeless association
59:17
now in my tour anyone who's seen this talk before would know that i show a page where they show the
59:21
links it says still under development um that disappeared about two weeks ago so clearly limeless
59:27
association has now had their developer they give them a kick up the backside um because the last
59:31
three years it said under development and now this new fancy site has started to come together
59:36
which looks amazing and maybe they've seen my talk and realised that they need to kick the
59:40
developer. If that was you I'm sorry for highlighting the fact you've been lazy for three
59:45
years but you can see here the Limbless Association but you know you go in there and it's you know
59:50
they're a fantastic association linked to the National Health Service here in the UK and I
59:55
hope you come through to find a prosthetic limb but it wasn't what I was looking for. I then said
59:59
I stumbled across the news article and dug a bit deep and found Team Unbelimited, where they are 3D printing
1:00:07
As you can see here, the Isabella edition arm. It's moved on since I was looking at this project three years ago
1:00:17
You can see there it's at hand, but you can see the section in the 3D print here where the fishing line comes up and hooks to a hub
1:00:27
and then again it works in the same principle where you move your shoulder and it opens and
1:00:31
closes the hand in fact we even made one of these for Caden um and he hated it because the fishing
1:00:38
line came out the bottom and as he moved his his hand back to forge and the reason he hated it
1:00:42
because for putting in front of the camera it doesn't quite make a grip um so Caden was unhappy
1:00:48
because he couldn't pick things up like he could with uh with his hook so it lasted all of about
1:00:53
under two minutes before he decided he didn't want it so we went back to the drawing board
1:00:57
we then stumbled across the open hand bionic open hand project which is 3d printed project but it's
1:01:04
got some motors inside so now we're starting to talk we're talking about robotics now um and as a
1:01:10
person that worked in the in the car industry for 11 years uh as a robot programmer and software
1:01:15
engineer um that's more my world that's more iot rather than just 3d printing something um you can
1:01:20
see here that um uh joel gibbard the guy that invented this picks out the fact that a a prosthetic
1:01:27
limb costs upwards of a hundred thousand pounds a hundred thousand dollars sorry for full uh
1:01:32
biomechanical uh with motors etc um prosthetic limb so you know that's way out the reach of
1:01:37
of even the nhs national health service unless there's a compelling reason like you're a sports
1:01:42
star or you need it because you know it's the only way you can you can live uh and carry out
1:01:48
your job functions, et cetera. So again, this was a great project and it was a start of looking into
1:01:55
this. And then we stumbled across, crossed my mouse again, we then stumbled across OpenBionics
1:02:01
Now, OpenBionics is what Joel Gibbard went on to create as a company. And it's called OpenBionics
1:02:05
at the time. Everything was open and on GitHub. You can see here, this is their Bruno hands
1:02:11
that they produce now. And so we can go along to OpenBionics and buy one of their hands or arms
1:02:18
and they'll make it bespoke for you or your child. And, you know, they're trying to get it into the National Health Service
1:02:25
And I know it's available in the US and France and Germany at the moment
1:02:29
And they're trying to roll it out as a business. And good luck to them. It's amazing. The life they're changing is fantastic
1:02:37
But we look at that GitHub. And so mine's in dark mind. I forgot to change it before for a talk. We look at GitHub
1:02:44
you can see here the last commit were three, four, five years ago
1:02:48
to the STL files. The STL file is what you take in the incentive 3D printer
1:02:52
to print out. The electronics and software is even longer. So you can see the fact that
1:03:01
they've not iterated on their design for quite a while. Even though us as the community
1:03:05
we're putting in PRs, they're just not taking them in and accepting them. So if we go back
1:03:10
to, if we minimize this should go back to my slides so we've looked at google and bing
1:03:17
and i fired up 3d printer and started printing now my rep rep mendel uh printer that i had at
1:03:25
time uh was good at printing boxes my iot projects but didn't really have the dexterity um to to
1:03:32
print uh the small parts for hands you know this is uh the index finger um it wasn't wasn't brilliant
1:03:38
printing that. So what do you do? Obviously you upgrade. So this is the Prusa Mark III i3 printer
1:03:46
I've got two of them here off to my sides. I've got one, which is the one that's built there
1:03:51
Another one, which my 11 year old son built and put together with no help from me
1:03:56
with me appearing over his shoulder every now and again, just to make sure the important parts were correct. And I'll come back to why that is later. The reason there's a blue part that's
1:04:04
it's circled in the image there it's a little bit dark actually I should change the contrast on the
1:04:08
image um it's because when I was building the printer I broke that part um I snapped it um so
1:04:13
I fired up the old rep rack Mendel printer and all I had was blue filament at the time so I printed
1:04:18
the uh the replacement part and all the the uh the black elements of that printer except the the
1:04:24
main square frame the center all 3d printed by Prusa in a factory in the Czech Republic so um
1:04:29
You know, you could buy one of these printers. When I bought it, it was the best part of £1,000
1:04:34
They're now around £600, so what, $1,000 if you're in the US, and they ship all over the world
1:04:39
They're amazing printers. They are, you know, top of the line, far better than you'll get anywhere else
1:04:45
For a home-built 3D printer, I highly recommend them. I've got another one which has got a five-filament spool on it, so it can take in five different colours as well
1:04:53
So we've built that. We've printed out all the parts. you can see there there's all the uh the white plastic parts the red plastic parts are flexible
1:05:00
filament so they're like the uh the tendons so they hold it all together and keep it in place
1:05:04
in the top corner there uh top left corner we've got the uh the four motors they're linear actuators
1:05:09
you apply voltage to go in and out by 20 millimeters there's a load of springs and
1:05:13
and dowels and parts and some uh little brass inserts if you need a thread in 3d printed
1:05:19
part um these inserts you put in with solv9 so they heat up you push them into plastic plastic
1:05:24
it melts, it pops over and on out and it solidifies around it such that you can then got a machine thread screw into
1:05:30
rather than a screwing in that plastic. So we had all the parts and then we need to connect it to Kaden
1:05:36
So this is my 3D printer, print out a socket. So remember I talked about Kaden's arm
1:05:39
and how it connects to him. He has it remoulded every year. We took one of the moulds that the hospital provided
1:05:46
The obstetric surgery was very helpful in providing that. And this is the plastic mould here
1:05:51
So we took this and my oldest son, McCauley, is a dab hand at 3D Design
1:05:57
She was going to the games development world and he free drew that in Blender
1:06:03
We printed it, as you can see there in the video. You can see there's five hours and 45 minutes after remaining
1:06:11
So I went off to bed, tend to leave the printer running overnight because it's normally pretty good at coping
1:06:16
Come back in the morning to 3D printer's worst nightmare, the print fouled
1:06:20
You can see it popped off the bed. and it's just off the back here
1:06:25
It pops onto the windowsill, thankfully, and the printer just carried on printing in free air
1:06:31
which is why you've got the spaghetti monster mess in the middle. But thankfully, it printed just enough
1:06:35
that we could try it out on Canem. So we did that and it didn't fit
1:06:39
It was too small. So we increased the size. We printed a second one and that was too big
1:06:43
And in true Once Upon a Time Storylands, Red Riding Hood, we printed a third one
1:06:51
and it fitted just right. And there's a version three, as you can see there
1:06:54
Caden trying out. To the point where he said it actually fitted better and it's more comfortable
1:06:59
than the NHS one. Just because we could blend off some of the corners inside
1:07:03
a little bit easier for him. And that is the design we have now
1:07:07
And every few months, his parents or he texts me and says, it's getting a bit tight
1:07:12
and make a new one. I print a new one. It's six hours on the printer
1:07:15
to print off at least 80 pence, so less than a dollar in plastic
1:07:19
to print a new one. I drop it on his doorstep and him always dad fits it and to his arm and he carry some with his day so you know the awesome stuff and super cheap more of this thousands of pounds in their chest and weeks of waiting So we see here this is a spreadsheet I put together
1:07:37
all the 3D printed parts. Now, the molds at the top, these molds here
1:07:42
in the hands, you see it better on this hand here, these black elements, you don't want those
1:07:47
because this is similar plastic to Lego plastic. So you don't want those because it's hard
1:07:51
you can't really grip things. so this is um molded on and it's a neoprene rubber so it goes into a mold which looks like this and
1:08:00
we fill the reservoir with neoprene we put the palm of the hand inside there so there's a few
1:08:04
different molds and then we squash this down and it squashes the the resin in and molds leave it
1:08:09
on the side for 24 hours and then you take the screws out pop it out clean it up a little bit
1:08:13
with a dremel and job done it's literally you know about an hour's work um to mold all the parts in
1:08:19
total and then you have all the parts molded on like this go back to my slide again please Simon
1:08:24
uh you can see there so the cost of the mold is uh is total cost of 10 pounds so what 15 dollars
1:08:32
give or take a bit um and I've still got the same set of molds I made the very beginning of this
1:08:37
project and I've probably made about 16 17 hands now um I'm still using the same set of mold so
1:08:42
that's a one-off cost for a hospital or a unit somewhere in the world to print the hand though
1:08:48
We're talking five pounds, $67 for all that plastic, all these parts of the hand that you can see
1:08:56
That is it. And the only other part you need is the flexible parts. These are the red parts that you see that hold the fingers together up the sides and also the thumb as well
1:09:06
And you see in the earlier picture, that's 20 pence worth of plastic. But you need to buy a spool which costs 30 pounds per kilo. But I'm still on the same spool
1:09:14
and as I say I you know I'm using 20 pence worth of plastic each time
1:09:18
and so the whole thing if you take the molds away comes to just over five
1:09:21
pounds for six or seven dollars so super super cheap not six and a half
1:09:25
to best part of eight or nine thousand NHS to produce one of these and then every year they have to change it
1:09:33
this is make it once and then every year all I have to do
1:09:37
is change the socket part and then Caden goes off and uses it
1:09:44
So how do we control this? Well, OpenBionics had a board called Chestnut Board
1:09:48
which was based on an Arduino chipset, the SAM DM0 chip was in there
1:09:58
And it was a homegrown, home-designed chip, which fitted in the back of the hand perfectly
1:10:04
And they had these built for themselves for the arms that they sold
1:10:09
but the problem they had was the fact that the the boards were um they made them in batches uh and
1:10:15
uh the problem was that they only sold on their store that had a lot of time um those that had
1:10:20
left over uh which was you know rare to find one um you could get one made but they were you know
1:10:26
very expensive to have one made and obviously he wasn't 100 certain it's going to work um when you
1:10:30
made it so you know it wasn't overly happy with the cost of the board because he paid and then
1:10:35
broke he's uh bored he's a child you know he dips it in water um that sort of thing and he gets
1:10:40
damaged he's got to wait weeks if not months for a new one it's going to cost hundreds of pounds
1:10:44
um wasn't working for me wasn't happy with that how did he can how to open bionics and uh they've
1:10:51
moved on from this design now but uh how did they control this well they use one of these which is a
1:10:55
my aware uh muscle sensor so these little muscle sensors i've got one here um as you can see in the
1:11:02
image these here stick on your arm and uh and you stick the the little uh the fly leads goes onto a
1:11:10
junction which is where there's no muscle and it will sense the uh sense of signal so we'll go back
1:11:15
to slides again um and i'll talk through how it works so what it does you stick it on the center
1:11:22
of the muscle mass uh and that's the correct place which you can see there in green um to get the most
1:11:26
signal differential um if you stick it along the muscle center line um but near the ends of you'll
1:11:32
get the intervention zone where you don't get enough signal even after slightly to sides you'll
1:11:36
get the midline offset which means you'll get no signal at all and the junction is where the little
1:11:40
fly lead goes where you want to so what you want is the biggest signal against the junction where
1:11:45
there's no signal which is the noise effectively uh the system and it will give you a signal as to
1:11:50
whether the muscles um being tensed or not what do we do with that then obviously um you stick
1:11:55
up the muscle that's not the scale my muscles are nowhere near as big as that one but you can see
1:11:59
kind of the idea now Caden had enough muscle mass in that what was left of his arm from his elbow
1:12:06
for us to stick the sensors on he's weirdly 90 degrees up to where you and I would have ours
1:12:11
so you stick the sensor on the on the inside forearm and outside forearm and the reason you
1:12:17
do that is you need a sensor for open and for close and so you need two sensors these cost 35
1:12:22
pound each you need two sensors the sticky pads a pack of 50 cost five pounds I know I'm doing
1:12:28
this in sterling um i'm pretty certain you can work out the exchange rates um so wherever you
1:12:34
are in the world watching this um so these sticky pads need to be changed you need six per day um
1:12:39
so a pack of 50 was going to last you just over a week so that's an ongoing cost uh the boards
1:12:44
that this one's broke uh it's been snapped already um didn't last very long for caden
1:12:49
um so he's a child he's going to break it it's stuck to his skin it's not going to last very
1:12:53
long it's not going to work um and no expensive boards so i didn't want to uh um didn't like the
1:12:58
idea either how does it work though where we want to do uh open is uh as you can see an image there
1:13:03
and close um this is audience participation time so if we can put your arm straight up like this
1:13:08
so we can get a bigger picture of me it's uh nicer to see if we get our claw fingers put them
1:13:13
just either side of the muscles here and then if you open your arm and put your palm out as in a
1:13:19
picture you'll feel the muscle at the back there goes tense if we close our arm so it's pointing
1:13:25
towards us the muscle at the front the forearm muscle goes tense we hold our hand straight up
1:13:29
and create a fist both muscles go tense so now we've got open signal closed signal and change
1:13:35
grip signal so now we've got a way of controlling our board so open bonnets can't these five grips
1:13:41
um that they believe were the five most commonly used grips and these are the ones they load in
1:13:46
their things but when we first tried to cascade and you went well i want to play my xbox my friends
1:13:50
can I have a special grip just for me? Well, okay. Right, we'll put that on the to-do list
1:13:55
It went into Gatby issues and we thought about it for a while or how we're going to sort this out for him
1:14:00
But let's look at how we control these grips at the moment. Now, this is all written in Arduino C
1:14:07
If anyone's played with Arduino C, it's a subset of C, C++
1:14:11
adapted for microcontrollers and given a bit of an Arduino flair. It's awesome
1:14:16
It's a great way to learn as well. But what they have is a 3D array
1:14:20
Now, if I zoom in on this to make it a little bit easier to see. So we look at the point gesture, which is this one here
1:14:28
There's an animation array that runs and it counts 0 to 100 over a period of time
1:14:33
And that is set in the settings. In Cadence Arm at the moment, it's 1.8 seconds. So over 1.8 seconds, it counts 0 to 100
1:14:39
And when it gets to 0, it sets the fingers positions to fully closed, fully open, fully closed, fully closed, fully closed
1:14:44
And then over the period of time, it animates. If it's blank, it looks at the previous one
1:14:49
So you can see that. when it gets to 100 it fully closes fully closes fully closes fully close
1:14:53
so you can see what it doing there is it closing all the all the fingers up now the the finger is um so the thumb is uh is uh is closed all the time and you see the open close close close so it creating the
1:15:07
the point gesture um for uh for making the point gesture of it's over there and you're pointing to
1:15:13
your best friend of where to go to get to the bathroom for example so you can see there that's
1:15:18
you know i've explained it we're software developers if i said to you go and make an xbox
1:15:21
grip you'd probably go away and spend an hour or so and be able to come up with an array that
1:15:26
fitted in there that counted up um similar to the pinch grip which counts up 0 10 40 and 100 so it's
1:15:31
got some steps in the middle you could create one that gripped the xbox controller and every time
1:15:35
it tends to muscle it twitched the trigger finger um you could create one of those but then you'd
1:15:41
need the arduino ide loaded you'd need all the the sdks and all the other things you need the
1:15:46
cable plug-in you need to take the hand apart to plug the cable into the board um you'd need your
1:15:50
laptop set up and plug it in to load the thing they need to make sure it works and debug it
1:15:55
it's a lot of work and we're software engineers we'd know how to do it but would a parent
1:15:59
would a doctor would a technician in a in a prosthetic unit know how to do that possibly
1:16:04
not so again that's something else that i wanted to fix it's a drawback so i'm going to cover this
1:16:09
quickly because i know i haven't got a lot of time here um but the processing boards is one
1:16:13
of supply i want to fix that the malware sensors they were expensive and um you need to play with
1:16:19
to tweak the uh the muscle uh gain levels and then the grips and seat suits we want to get our own
1:16:24
so i use adafruit featherboards a lot in my ot projects because they're awesome you can get them
1:16:30
anywhere even from amazon um and they're awesome the feather unit here the uh the red section at
1:16:36
the bottom there that area there is the kind of area where they put the difference you can get one
1:16:40
with wi-fi bluetooth laurawan etc etc so this one's got bluetooth and a little um uh antenna
1:16:46
on the end there. It's got the same process that was in the OpenBionics one. It's got
1:16:50
a GST plug, which means you can charge a battery. Awesome. And it had everything
1:16:54
I needed, all the og inputs and outputs I needed. So there's some specs. I'm going to
1:16:58
skip past that. You can look those up if you wish. So this is the circuit I built
1:17:03
And the other board that you can see here, this is the Adafruit board here. The other board you can see there is the
1:17:10
Merck controller board, also an Adafruit board as well. And that means
1:17:14
I can just use I squared C which is a serial protocol to talk to that board and say move motor
1:17:20
one to this position and it sorts it out for me I don't need to worry about it and then the main
1:17:25
process can go back to doing other things like listening to the listening to the og input
1:17:30
of the potentiometer that's built into the motors the circuit there is you can see fully built a
1:17:38
little bit closer you can see there's also a Pololu voltage regulator in there which is to take the
1:17:43
voltage from the battery and step it to the voltage needed for the boards
1:17:47
And the reason they did that was because the open bionic system, they have a big battery on the, on the upper arm here
1:17:55
which is 14.4 volts. The motors draw 12 volts and they draw quite a big current when initially
1:18:01
move, but then it's milliamps afterwards. You only really move in a small amount, but they have a big battery 14.4 volts
1:18:07
And that is from an RC car. So you use the same cells from that
1:18:11
which means you then need a specialist charger. I didn't like that. I wanted a charger that anyone's got, USB charger
1:18:18
So I use these Anker power bricks. We've all got them. We all know them. We get them from conferences, hopefully
1:18:23
But this one is 20 pound from Amazon. It's a 10,000 milliamp hour battery
1:18:28
It will run the arm for at least a day, if not more, except Caden unplugged it to charge his mobile phone
1:18:34
or his friend's mobile phone from time to time. So the polylunion unit there steps this voltage
1:18:40
Which is 5 volts down to 3.3 which is required by the By the boards and there's another polyluminant steps up from 5 volts up to 12 volts which is to power the motors
1:18:50
Which works really really well Yet to burn any of the boards out and came has been using it for quite a while now
1:18:56
The flat ribbon cable there. I need to wire on sending a bit of
1:19:00
Soldering there to get it to work to wire on plug in the the bits and motors if I go back
1:19:05
you can see there I'm holding it in the right hand image holding a flat ribbon can come from
1:19:10
motors so I needed to put some some connectors on there bit of soldiering but other than that
1:19:15
it's a fairly simple circuit to build so I've crossed off the processor my aware sensor then
1:19:21
how do we do this I was flying to Japan I remember the flight vividly so somewhere over the middle
1:19:26
of Russia no one to talk to on air traffic control and you know when there's not much to do we'll
1:19:32
read a magazine or flick through, you know, do a crossword or something in between monitoring
1:19:38
the aircraft. And I know you're probably thinking, my God, the pilots are watching, reading a magazine
1:19:42
and not flying a plane. The old pilots fly in a plane and you come very adept to be out and read a sentence or
1:19:50
two and then scanning up the instruments, having a look around and then reading a sentence
1:19:54
or two and looking around again. and it's otherwise you will get you know um you know sort of uh watching all the instruments all
1:20:02
the time uh intently um you know certainly in the middle of night you'll just become sleepy and
1:20:07
drowsy imagine staring at a speedometer when you're driving and just staring at that or even
1:20:10
the lights on the night drive uh of the cat's eyes that fly past you on the motorway um yeah it
1:20:16
becomes a bit you know so you have the radio on uh and you listen to music you know we can't do
1:20:21
actually have to listen to our truck controls we'll read a magazine uh or you know something
1:20:25
simple um so it's reading this magazine hacksbank magazine you've not heard it go to their website
1:20:30
and uh and sign up and get it it's awesome if you love iot uh this article is about arduino
1:20:36
debugging you notice they um that they're talking about uh graham's uh morrison is talking about
1:20:41
arduino debugging and the sensor is using uh there it's plugged into the board is a piezoelectric
1:20:47
sensor, much like your piezoelectric sound that is in your laptop or your PC, which makes
1:20:55
a sound when you turn on it, it goes beep, beep, beep, if you've got a memory problem, for example. That is where you apply electric voltage to the piezo crystal and then make a sound, so
1:21:03
it vibrates. This one, if you knock it or bash it, it vibrates and creates a microvoltage output, which you
1:21:10
can then measure. So that's what he was using this here. And there's a little resistor in the middle there, there's a resistor bridge, just to
1:21:16
make it work. um so we i landed in japan only a pack of 10 of these cost one pound delivered from amazon
1:21:21
um and how they can be made whether they're made in the world and shipped to my door for less than
1:21:26
a pound i do not know but jeff bezos is a multi-billionaire so he obviously knows how it
1:21:31
works um so i got that we tried it it didn't quite work caden hated it because we could only sense
1:21:36
the um the trigger of opening close couldn't control the middle so spark fund another um uh
1:21:44
site i use for buying electronics they have these um force sensitive resistors and you can see in
1:21:49
the gif there or jiff depend what side of the fence you sit on um as you apply pressure it changes the
1:21:55
the resistance of that uh resistor that is built into you put a resistor bridge across it as well
1:22:00
you can control how much it uh it ramps up and down and uh we fitted those and uh i've got one um
1:22:08
i did have one it's around somewhere and it's just fitted inside the socket so you can see the
1:22:14
the pad there. On the back of it, it's got some 3M glue
1:22:19
So you peel off sticky things, stick it inside the socket. And there no electronics then for cadence of damage as a child There nothing for him to break So we got rid of the MoetWare sensor You can see there a pack of two for six pounds So I now gone on slightly bigger square ones which are five pound each
1:22:36
purely because we needed the muscle sensor to a bigger area for the muscle to squish it
1:22:42
And because the plastic is hard, it's squashing it against the hard surface. So as you touch your muscle
1:22:47
your muscle kind of grows in size and it squashes this sensor against the hard plastic
1:22:51
and gives that a reading where you can use the measure, which means now Caley can stop the hand mid-grip if he wants to do something different
1:22:57
or change to a different grip or open again, et cetera. He can do all that because he's now got infinite control using that muscle sensor
1:23:05
So this is just a fricking drawing of the circuit that's put together
1:23:09
It looks complicated, but we've just got the battery, the two poly-humits
1:23:13
one stepping up, one stepping down, two controller boards, two sensors in the corner and four motors
1:23:18
And I can build this. I've done lots of them now, but I can solve this together all in under an hour
1:23:22
I could probably teach you how to solder and put one together in two hours even if you've never soldered it before
1:23:30
It would take that long. So to teach someone technician in a hospital unit somewhere around the world, that's completely doable
1:23:37
Now we cross off the MyWare sensors. Now we come to the last bit, which is the other grips
1:23:42
As I said, the sensor board has a Bluetooth transmitter on the end and I write Xamarin projects
1:23:48
So we wanted to work on building something for that. If you've worked with Bluetooth, it's complicated, as in it's got so many different names because so many different companies all vying for calling it and their name being the right thing
1:24:00
We went with Bluetooth Low Energy because we only need to send a packet of data and then the device to turn off and reconnect later and send a packet of data
1:24:07
So the way Bluetooth works, I'm sure you know, is a central device, your tablet, your phone, your computer, which talks to peripheral devices
1:24:14
be that hand in the hands, your watch, your Fitbit, your Garmin, be that, I don't know
1:24:20
your car, when you jump in your car, you chuck your phone down and it talks to your car
1:24:25
et cetera. They're the peripheral devices. The central processor does the main thinking. They're still called master, even though really we should be calling it main now
1:24:32
but it's still called master. So we look at this. You see the master and the slave
1:24:38
The master and slave talk when they did initial connection and then agree a connection interval
1:24:42
which means then the master will at that agreed time will turn on and send a packet of data and
1:24:49
the slave will reply with its data or or replies the message is sent then they'll both turn off
1:24:54
until the next connection interval elapses you can set that connection time as wide or as short
1:24:59
as you need to be and that's the way bluetooth flow energy works how does that packet data look
1:25:05
it's just much like a class that you have inside your your your dotnet program your c sharp
1:25:10
um you know you have your your class then your service is going to be your your your model within
1:25:15
that your character is going to be each of the different properties within there so um you know
1:25:20
your your service could be uh heart rate um for a watch and then another one could be the steps
1:25:25
uh um and then within that character how many steps a day and how many steps in the last hour
1:25:30
and the heart rate could be what's the instant heart rate what is the heart rate over the last
1:25:33
hour so you can see how it builds up so now if we go across to uh to visual studio um
1:25:40
and I need to get the right one. There we go
1:25:50
And that should resize. You can see here that we've got, we just pull in the Adafruit parts for the Bluetooth
1:25:57
and the libraries. It's all in C, as I said. And then we give it a name here
1:26:04
which is handy. And we set some factory settings. And then all we're doing is sending serial data
1:26:08
back to boards um so that sealed data is uh is just sent as a sealed protocol uh using new arts
1:26:16
which is uh the sealed protocol using iot and it just sends commands back and forth so super super
1:26:21
simple which has been told about a five minute warning um so i'm going to not labor this too much
1:26:27
um and come back to my slides um i talked about the fact that i do xamarin development as well
1:26:34
I'm going to blame Alan for this because he stole some of my time out of running 10 minutes long
1:26:40
So in Xamarin, you have traditional Xamarin forms. Traditional is where it's all C-sharp backend, but you write each of the different UI layers in iOS, Android or UWP for Windows
1:26:51
Or you have Xamarin forms, which is where even the UI layer is written in Xaml or in C-sharp
1:26:57
And it's shared across the three different platforms. We've now got that MAUI coming in .NET 6 in November
1:27:04
adding into iOS, Android, GWP, you've got Mac OS as well. And Community have also bought in Tism
1:27:12
which is a Samsung used for fridges and their stuff. So, you know, it's growing as well
1:27:19
So look at the Xamarin.Forms shell. And in fact, I'm not going to do that
1:27:23
because I haven't got time to whiz into that. But in Xamarin.Forms shell
1:27:26
you can create the app that you want. I want to get on to actually showing you
1:27:34
this working so what I do is I create the projects and if I bring on
1:27:41
visor which is here and I just need to quickly close this and reopen it again
1:27:47
and connect the hands you can see here this is my mobile phone that is in front of me
1:27:55
it's all written in Xamarin and you see it's not connected connect first and I'll
1:28:00
try to make this simple so I'm connect the battery because it only does it on power on and connect this and we'll start scanning the Bluetooth you see it's got
1:28:07
Bluetooth there and if we scan again we've got handy it's been renamed now
1:28:12
the boards booted up and it comes into the app my son's God get rid of that
1:28:20
done much picked up calendar things I thought I'd just muted that we go into
1:28:24
the URL connection I think I've yeah let me do that again because that's
1:28:30
interrupted what I was doing. So connect, do this
1:28:41
There, we'll start scanning and we got Andy, so going to that, it's now connected, it stops
1:28:46
scanning and then we go into the UART and we'll see the fact that it should, there you go
1:28:50
start talking. So now they're talking between the two. This is got
1:28:55
this UART Connect at the moment is set up for me as the developer, so it's sending the stuff that would stream out to my laptop that I can see
1:29:02
You can see the commands there, setting it up, and it's got some settings in there already
1:29:07
But if I go back to the grip selection, you can see here is all the grips
1:29:11
and this is a carousel view, and you've got some there that are grayed out because they're disabled
1:29:15
You can see there that I'm controlling by just tapping the screen
1:29:20
So I've got the fist grip there, and you can control this. So there you go, even better
1:29:27
so you can see this is the hand moving and see Caden's got control of the fist grip
1:29:32
and we've got a point gesture so it's over there mate you can go that way
1:29:36
you can see also in the top you've got the the heart so you can make it a favourite
1:29:41
and the likes if we go across the grip order Caden may not want fist grip hook grip point grip
1:29:48
maybe he wants to point first because he's uh he's kind of telling people where to go so you
1:29:52
So you can put that at the top of the list, save that back to the hands, and now that's the order
1:29:57
You remember I said earlier, you can open and close, to control the grip when you close your fist it will go to the next grip in the grip sequence
1:30:04
so he has three grips in the grip sequence there because if you go back the grip selection they're
1:30:10
the three that he's got selected um also you can create a grip build up so you've got the animation
1:30:16
step timer at the top there you can put the step move the the slides across and it'll uh move the
1:30:21
hands and then you can add it um to the grip and create your own grip um grip sequence and we did
1:30:28
this using the app to create a caden and xbox script and then going back into the menu this
1:30:34
flyout menu is all part of the xamarin forms shell i highly recommend you go to docs.microsoft.com
1:30:39
and look up on xamarin forms uh and look at the shell architecture it's brilliant um super simple
1:30:45
we've got your control which talks about earlier which is for me as the developer to send commands
1:30:49
but also a technician in the hospital to send commands changing things like the um the muscles
1:30:54
controls and the muscle sensing as well but this is low level stuff so we created a setting screen
1:31:00
to change the uh the hold times and the threshold peak times etc enable and disable the motors um
1:31:07
you know set the muscle sensors uh muscle modes etc as well um so that can all be done as well
1:31:12
um we keep a lot of stuff out there so caden can't break his hand because in his version of the app
1:31:18
the ur control is disabled um and then we've got the muscle sensor check so every couple of days
1:31:23
cadence prompted to go in there and uh connects his hands and then he does open and close for just
1:31:30
the muscles and it'll move those two green bars up and down and um he does that change grip does
1:31:36
that change grip does that change grip as it says uh and it records a sensor values it's sent sent
1:31:42
up to an Azure function in the cloud stored stored in um in the cloud in storage and the idea is it
1:31:48
will then come back later and get a machine learning model to learn how to adapt those
1:31:53
sensor values in the settings as well so i'm just going to disable that um the reason here the
1:31:58
whining is because i have the uh the motors tuned so that i can hear them so i know when they're on
1:32:03
um and also when it's tuned out of our audible range it drives my dogs bonkers it's still in
1:32:08
their audible range um so uh we will get that down um i do the builds in uh in um in uh visual
1:32:18
studio for the xamarin project i then do a git push goes up to uh to github uh and it's stored
1:32:24
there uh app center a free service from uh from microsoft as well is monitoring that uh that build
1:32:30
pipeline that github push and pulls in and does a dev build for me and push it down to my phone
1:32:34
and if i push to main now this slide's old actually uh if i push the main um it will do a dev build
1:32:41
and push it to caden and his and his parents phone and the other people who are involved in the project
1:32:46
as well, it'll push to their devices because I've made a major change that I want to push to them as well App center pricing is free There is a paid for tier as well if you want more build limits but 240 build minutes is a lot of build minutes for building mobile apps It pretty darn
1:33:01
quick. So drawbacks then. We said earlier, we've got rid of the malware sensor because we've gone
1:33:06
to the sensor from SparkFun and I bought them from Amazon now because they sell them as well
1:33:13
We got rid of the process by going to a native fruit board and we got rid of the grips now because
1:33:17
now we can do it all with the summary informs app and caden's got his xbox grip which is awesome
1:33:22
um he can now play his xbox with his friends and he's got his set such that the grip is that when
1:33:26
he opens and closes it does a trigger finger so he can shoot as quick as his friends can and it
1:33:31
holds that so he can then use his other two his thumb and his finger which is on his other hand
1:33:36
for moving the joystick and pushing the buttons and to see him use this is phenomenal it's really
1:33:42
really clever how he's adapted to using this. But he can now play his Xbox with his friends
1:33:48
So this here is a total project. You can see the two sensors. The Xamarin app is open source on my GitHub
1:33:53
You can go out there and see. There's a private GitHub at the moment for some work we're doing
1:33:58
which hopefully I'll release soon to the public preview. So there is some bits there that are not the same as the app you've just seen
1:34:04
But you can go out there and download it. All the STL files, 3D printing, all the circuit designs are up there on GitHub
1:34:10
Download it. build one for uh for someone or even for your desk because you want to show off that you've got one
1:34:15
but all the components um the whole lot comes just over 500 pounds or you know 680 dollars
1:34:21
um all the components to make one of these hands uh i've got some motors on my bench behind me
1:34:25
which i'm trialing uh in the hands uh in this one here um uh to see if i can switch out these
1:34:32
motors because they're the most expensive part their best part of 80 84 85 pounds um uh to buy
1:34:37
and shipped in from the US. If I can get rid of those, I can reduce the cost drastically
1:34:42
and get it down to 200, 300 pounds, which would be awesome. So what's next
1:34:47
Build out the Xamarin app as we're doing, connect it to machine learning to send the values back to the
1:34:52
to change the settings in the app, which then gets sent back to the hands. Go full .NET
1:34:57
And we're going to use the Meadow board for that because that's .NET on board IoT
1:35:01
If you've not heard of that, go out to Wilderness Labs and look up their Meadow board, the F7. Awesome
1:35:06
And I'll skip over that. Why do I mention being a pilot at the very beginning? It's because the plan was this 3D printer my 11-year-old son built without any help
1:35:15
I was going to put in a box with some filament and some of the parts that needed and take it to a part of the world and meet up with a hospital unit
1:35:25
There's a hospital in Pakistan that are interested in hosting me. And they're going to take this 3D printer
1:35:31
I'm giving it to them free of charge. I'm going to teach them to fly back to Forge every now and again to help them build prosthetic
1:35:37
limbs for the children there. So giving back to the community and that is the aim
1:35:43
If you know of another hospital unit somewhere else in the world maybe in your local area that wants to learn how to do this please reach out to me um my twitter is there i on twitter um and let me know and we see if we can hook up and that sort of thing out i everything that in the box comes to less than a thousand pounds
1:35:58
and they can make about 15 hands for that and then they need to start buying their own um own
1:36:04
filament and springs and nuts and bolts and things which is as we said earlier is very very cheap so
1:36:09
that's why i mentioned being a pilot that's my talk i'm gonna say thanks to caden and family
1:36:13
they've been awesome in helping this journey over the last couple of years and you'll find me on the
1:36:17
speaker circuit as uh over the uh the conferences come back and i'll talk more and more about how
1:36:22
this project is moving forward that's my talk i don't think i've got time for questions but find
1:36:26
me on twitter if you you've got any and i'll answer them there thank you that was an amazing
1:36:31
session cleft to be honest i was really wasn't expecting that all the all that would come you
1:36:35
start you talk about different components you did talk about fixing sparks fun which i use it that
1:36:40
you actually you don't just build in a device you also connect it with samlin apps that you have
1:36:45
built so an end-to-end uh or you i can see a product that you have built so that that's really
1:36:50
magnificent if you go ahead and check the comments people are really amazed that how come you go ahead
1:36:55
and actually 90 comments 90 comments so it's going to take me a while to read for all those
1:37:01
yeah so people really love it so uh so one thing the quick question that came in the comment that
1:37:06
that I definitely want you to go ahead and answer is that okay doing it as a hobby building it and
1:37:10
keeping it in your workshop is something people would just go and do it they would build it keep
1:37:14
it in the workshop or put it in the showcase but there's one question coming up from Viti he says
1:37:18
how do you actually go in and connect with kids who actually need this prosthetics
1:37:22
yeah I was lucky in the fact that the Caden's family approached me at the very beginning and
1:37:30
that's where that started other other children that we've done it for have been because obviously
1:37:36
Caden is part of groups that go to meetups with other children that have a limb loss of some kind
1:37:42
so we've built some for them as well and then people find out about me giving conference talks
1:37:47
and mentioning it and then they reach out to me on Twitter can you help me build one as well
1:37:51
so you know if you know someone reach out and I'm quite happy to to help build one I won't do it all
1:37:57
myself because I want the community to dive in and help but I'll quite happily 3D print the parts
1:38:01
and help you source the components and help you build it. But, yeah, it's a fun project
1:38:08
You know, we 3D print the arm because Cade needs an arm
1:38:12
because he's missing quite a bit. Other children, we've done it. We've had to move the battery from slots in there to further up
1:38:18
and it straps onto their shoulder because their limb goes all the way down to the wrist
1:38:23
So we've adapted this part in the middle, and that's, you know, 80 pence worth of plastic
1:38:27
So that bit we can adapt as well. So yeah, it's a fun project
1:38:32
I enjoy doing it. It's a way of giving back to the community. That's great
1:38:36
People really love your session, Cliff. I really love it too. So thank you so much for the time I won take my session And I also didn hear that you also traveling to Pakistan or some other hospitals across the globe So maybe if you come here to Asia we would love to host you Because Pakistan and India is very near
1:38:50
So why not? I come to India quite a lot as well. I do come there quite a lot
1:38:55
But yeah, I do. Have you ever been to Delhi region? Yeah, I've been to Delhi quite a few times
1:39:00
Yeah, I've stayed there a lot. I love India. It's a wonderful country
1:39:05
All right. So we would love to host you in the offline conference of that video. So, Kurt, I won't take much of your time
1:39:09
Thank you so much. Once again, any final words you want to say before we wrap it up
1:39:14
No, thanks everyone for coming along. Hope you enjoyed the rest of the conference. There's some amazing talks after me as well
1:39:18
And have fun moving Pete's robotic arm later. As you go to Pete's talk, you've got a great talk there
1:39:24
But yeah, cool. Thanks everyone. Thanks so much. Bye. Take care. Have a nice day. Bye-bye
1:39:28
All right. That was an amazing session for Cliff. As I just said, I wasn't really expecting that to outcome
1:39:33
And I believe everyone wasn't expecting. He's a pilot and he does all this noble work
1:39:37
So really appreciate what he does. So we will now take a break of almost like 30 minutes and then we will come back for the second half of the conference where we're going to talk about the machine learning from machine learning and IoT from Mehrin Tahir
1:39:52
Then we have some sessions on Azure SQL, Edge and Raspberry Pi. And you also have sessions on Project 15 by Sarah, who is actually the founder of Project 15 within Microsoft
1:40:02
So some of the really amazing sessions coming up. And before I go ahead and actually close the first half
1:40:07
we have a contest going on. Our sponsor Stratus for this conference has planned to go ahead
1:40:12
and give away a Surface Laptop 4, a 15-inch laptop. It has the latest processor and some really..
1:40:21
It is the best laptop. You can just go ahead and win it. You just have to tweet us, be active on these live streams
1:40:28
and yeah, keep asking questions. So that's how you can actually go and win it
1:40:31
just type us at C sharp corner and C sharp live show
1:40:35
So that's it. So you can find actually the link of the second broadcast
1:40:39
in the description. Also, I'm gonna put this in the comments. So feel free, take a break of 325 minutes
1:40:46
and we will be back at this link. So that on the second half of this conference
1:40:53
So thank you so much once again, everyone. We'll see you in a short break of 325 minutes
1:41:00
See ya. All right