So, thanks so much for having me here. I can't believe how many people are here when I came in this room. Can you see me? Oh man, this has got to die. It's going to be co-starring

my friends on GChat. I thought they were watching the live feed, but I guess they're not. So, when I came in here, there wasn't a lot of people. I mean, there was.

There was a ton of people for the last talk, and I was like, this is great. It's not full, and then you guys all came back. So, this is really awesome. Thanks so much for coming to hear me. I hope to have some awesome surprises for you. Atlanta has been super fun. I'm here visiting from New York City, which is different. It's nice and warm here. It's not nice and warm in New York right now.

Everyone is super friendly. Yesterday, I was on the elevator. I guess I can't stay away from this. Yesterday, I was on the elevator, and a man looked at me, and he said, hey, how's it going? How's your afternoon going? I'm having a great afternoon, and I was like, this man is going to

kidnap me, and no one knows that I'm on this elevator, and I don't know what's gonna happen, but he didn't, and I was like, I'm okay. Thank you. So, it's been that since I got here, so that's really awesome. I'm getting used to it now, so. So, I'm Sarah. There's a really,

really nice picture of me in the program. I figured I'd put a less nice picture of me in the actual presentation. As Sarah said, I've done JavaScript for a long time, been doing hardware for the past couple years, and when the organizers reached out to me, I was super flattered, but like you, I was like, well, you know, I've managed a few

teams that have built awesome Rails applications, so, you know, there's that, but I definitely haven't committed as much to Rails as this guy, or this amazing woman, or this awesome guy, and so I was like, why? I'm so flattered. Why do you want to hear from me? And they're like, we want to do something with hardware, and I was like, I can do that.

That is awesome. So, I was super stoked, and I'm excited to show you guys a little bit about hardware. So, today, here's what you can expect in the next 45 minutes or so. I'm going to talk to you a little bit about my journey as a professional going from a software focus for 13 years to switching completely over to hardware.

You're going to hear from some people that are totally new to hardware about their journey, the past month and a half, learning all about hardware, and you're going to see some sweet demos as well. So, here we go. So, this all happened in 2012. I went to a conference

called Node Dublin. It was in Dublin at the Guinness factory, which was awesome. They opened the taps at 8am when the conference started, which was ridiculous, but we were on their time, so it worked out. And, halfway through Node Dublin,

there was a presentation by a bunch of people about hardware and something called Node Bots, and there was some really cool stuff. This guy, James, both bought a drone, which was pretty cool. He taught it to charge whenever it saw the colour red, so he was going around

the stage with a red cape, and the drone was coming after him, and that was pretty cool. And there was an amazing woman there named Emily Rose, and she started her story about the night before, and she was like, listen, so I've been working really hard to program this fog machine with JavaScript. It worked at home, but the electricity here is different. I blew out all

the lights in the hotel last night. There's a huge brown spot on my wall. This should work today. I'm not 100% sure, so let's try it. We'll see what happens. We were like, all right, well, let's try it. So, two seconds into it, the whole room fills up with fog.

All the security team from Guinness ran in wondering what on earth is going on. No one warned them, so all of a sudden this huge conference room, like this big, just filled up with smoke. Everyone was freaking out, and I was like, this is awesome. I need to learn how to do this. This is so cool. So I went up to her afterwards, and I was like, tell me more about

this. How did you get involved? You know, I want to do this, and she handed me just like a little bag of LEDs, and she was like, here, take these, get them to light up, and you're started. And I was like, wow, I have no idea how these things work, but I'm going to take it, and I'm going to do it, because that's what we do, right? In programming, we just figure it out.

We find something we don't know. We just figure it out. So, next thing I knew, I talked to this gentleman named Rick Waldron who wrote a library called Johnny Five, and Johnny Five is a JavaScript library that communicates to an Arduino, so usually with

Arduino, can I see some hands of anyone that's played with Arduino? Awesome. So I want to say like 17%. That was roughly, strangely precise, but let's count after. So you usually

program it in C, and that could be difficult. I hadn't done C since school, and being able to do it in JavaScript was a lot easier. There's a lot of libraries like this too. You can use Ruby as well, Python. There are a lot of different libraries that allow you to communicate with Arduino. So I was like, well, why don't we put

together a hack weekend? I knew a lot of other people that wanted to do it, and he was like, sure. So we got together for a weekend, and this is the magic that I made. That light is turning on and off. Amazing. So after that, I was hooked, and it was really

neat. We had a lot of fun the months leading up to, leading after that. We actually won Node Knockout. Node Knockout is a rip-off of the Ruby rumble where we do the exact same thing. Teams from around the world compete, and my team and I competed against 700 teams, and we ended

up winning the Innovation Award for our Christmas sweater that talked to the internet, which was awesome. After that, I got involved in a whole bunch of other things, but I really never thought about it as a possible career until later. So I started thinking about

the things that we were building. We made a lot of robots, and I was like, well, maybe I can make something attractive. What if I made a necklace that changed colour based on your Twitter stream? You know, like, if you're in a bad mood because of a bad, and you have a bad tweet, your necklace changes colour. So I think it was important for me to find things that were

small, so I found these little Arduino called femto-dunos, and femto-dunos are super tiny. They're like maybe an inch long, and they have the same processing power as an Arduino Uno,

which is a lot bigger, maybe this big. So I found one of those, and then I looked online to see if I could find a necklace that would fit in, and I went on Etsy, and I tried to find the biggest locket I could find. The biggest wasn't big enough, and then I went on Alibaba, and I found these Christmas ornaments, and I made something. I tried to make it work.

It actually really wasn't that beautiful. If you see this picture, I tried to accent it with all these different necklaces to make it look like a normal size, but it's still this big glowing thing around my neck, so I was like, all right, so at least I've got this thing working.

I had it change in colour based on your tweets, and so I was like, all right, well, what's next? I should make something that looks better, and so what do we do in software, right? We make an MVP, and then we iterate on that MVP, and hardware is not that much different. In some ways, hardware is not different from software. We're building, we're iterating, we're

moving on. In other ways, hardware is very different than software. One thing I realised is that software just lives in a computer, and it's like pretend, right? We can tear it apart and put it back together fairly quickly, and hardware takes much longer. In software, you can

do a MVP in six to eight weeks, right? So you can take some time off of work and focus on building, the bare minimum of what you need, and in hardware, six to eight weeks is nine months to a year, or sometimes even longer, so it's definitely, there's very many parallels, but

in many ways, it's not, it's very different, so, but in the way of iterating, it's the same thing, so I was like, okay, I have this completely ugly thing. Now I'm going to iterate on that and try to find something more beautiful, so this is the second version of that exact same thing.

As you can see, this one is accentuated by the sick font, and so this necklace is the same thing. I found a guy on Etsy who helped me design it, and I used the same parts and built this, and in the process, I started thinking about where the place that

we lose girls while they're growing up, and a lot of times, a lot of studies show that when girls hit puberty, they start thinking that the technology, math, science, things like that,

aren't so much for them, and they don't, they don't play video games as much, so they don't get the whole, I want to be a video game programmer when I grow up, as much. Some of them do, so I started focusing this project that I started calling Juliebots on figuring out how we can

kind of maybe fool girls, teenage girls into programming, right? So something that you guys I'm sure have noticed is, or you may or may not have noticed, if you're my age, you have friends that learned how to code because of MySpace, right? And all of a sudden, MySpace got really huge,

and all your friends all of a sudden knew how to do image tags. A lot of times, I say that now, and people are like, what? And I'm like, all right, so Minecraft, same thing, there's a ton of kids out there, they're like 10 years old, they're teaching themselves Java, and they're like tiny little server admins, because they have this thing that they love, and they want to make it

better. So I tried to start focusing on finding something that they would love. So I started working on this project, iterating on this design, and about the same time,

this hardware accelerator called Highway One started happening in San Francisco, and I was thinking the only way, because hardware, the only way you could really focus on it full time is with investment and help. So I reached out to them, I sent in an application, and we got in last September. This is going to keep happening, I'm really sorry.

And so we got in last September, so I quit my day job with an awesome company that's been super supportive and left to join Highway One, which was awesome. It was no longer,

it was no longer, oh sorry, it was my first time using Prezi, have you guys ever used Prezi? Hope it's not making any of you dizzy. Okay, so it was crazy, because now I was working with actual electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, industrial designers on an actual product,

and not a weekend hack, which was pretty wild and super intimidating, but really awesome. So right out the gate, the most important thing that they drilled into our heads was, if you haven't spent time talking to your users, you're wasting your time, throw away what you've built, and sit down and talk to the people that you're building for,

which made so much sense. I was sitting there like, oh I remember being a teenager, here's what I wanted, here's what I would have wanted, right? And when I was a teenager, it's totally different from now. When I was a teenager, I was like, I wish there was an internet, you know, and now everyone has like the computer and their cell phones, so it's such a different

world. So we started talking to them. In the past year, I've talked to over 100 teenagers, which is a lot more fun than it sounds. They're super great to talk to, and I've learned so much from them, and what we finally learned after talking to them for a while,

our initial theory was, okay, we're going to build something that lets them change the color of their jewelry in the morning to match their outfits, because I was like, I would have totally loved that when I was a teenager. That would have been so great. So I talked to them about it, and they were not into that idea at all. They're like, no, that's not really cool, but you know what is cool? I want to talk to my friends while we're in class, because I have to shut my phone off, and I can't talk to them,

and I was like, all right, and they were like, we want people, one thing that's huge to them are their friendships. It's like the most important thing in their world at that age. Who are my friends? How do we show our friendships? And you know, we did it with friendship

bracelets, where we would have best friend necklaces or bracelets, and so working with them and learning about this stuff, we kind of landed on building a mesh network of wearables where they can not only talk to each other, but their jewelry matches when they're together. So when I'm with my friend group, all of our bracelets match, and if I have a different

friend group there, my bracelet is multi-colored, so it matches them as well, and we can send each other vibrations and messages when we're in class. So now that we knew, now we talked to our users, knew what we were doing, the next step was actually building it.

So in the meantime, we worked with a team called Red Start to start designing stuff that they would want to wear. So we came up with mood boards like this, where we just sent a ton of different designs and literally let them make all the decision-making processes. We worked with a bunch of high schools in the area, and we would send them

things like this and be like, tell us which one you like the best. So our industrial design team was working on something like that, and one thing we learned from the crew at Highway 1 is there are two types of prototypes you should focus on during this time. There's a looks-like prototype, which is what your ultimate design will look like, and a works-like

prototype, where you can test the functionality, because often a limitation this early when you're playing with Arduino is it's not very, it's too big to put inside your ultimate version of what you're building. So while our industrial design team was working on our

works-like prototype, and so this is the first board we designed with the help of folks at Highway 1. This uses an RFduino, which is another Arduino-compatible microprocessor, and RFduino uses Bluetooth, and this also has a button, that guy right under the big

microprocessor, and a motor, and another thing we designed to work with it was an LED board. We use NeoPixels, which is a type of LED that allows you to treat them like an array, and they're individually addressable, so you can change their colors independently of each other.

So that was our design for our board that we were going to test, and we wanted to put it in something that would give our users at least, it may not be as small as a bracelet, but at least the idea of what we were giving them to play with. So we designed this outer casing that had

a flower and a button, and the inner casing for the mechanics to go together, the lights, and the board, and in the meantime our industrial design team was working on the looks-like version. So based on the feedback we got from our users, we made these two designs,

things that they picked, and what we did is we 3D printed them, and put them on bands, and sent it to them, and was like, wear these for a couple weeks, and let us know what you think. So in order to get our work-like prototype done, this was stuff we couldn't 3D print. It was

injection molded plastic, as well as aluminum base. So we started working with a manufacturing team in San Francisco, which is interesting, right? For these like one-off things, it's so expensive to build things one-off. One of those flowers was like 800 bucks,

and if we made 20,000 of those flowers, it would have been so much less, but this is the stuff you learn when you're building hardware. So we built these prototypes, and we programmed them to get to our final functionality

of sending messages and understanding each other's proximity, and they worked like that, which was pretty awesome. So as soon as we finished that process, we got to testing, and we got our user groups together, and we were like, girls, is this fun?

Do you enjoy this? Is this something you would do if it was very small and on your wrist? How much would you pay for it? That's a hard thing. No one ever, I mean, who knows? I remember this user session. One of the girls was like, we were like, you know, is this price point too high? She was like, I pay $200 for my sneakers, so I was like, all right.

That is awesome. But it's not going to be $200. So we worked with them, and we got great feedback on the functionality, which was what we hoped for, incredibly rewarding, and as far

as it looks like, we ended up on this design. That's a three millimeter silicone band. Right, one thing that we've observed about that age group is they like wearing lots of bracelets and stacking them up their arms, so we wanted to make the band separate so they could buy them separately, as well as the charms separate, because keeping up with fashion at that age is

really difficult as well. So the electronics interchange with the charms, so you can put a new charm on it whenever we have a new design, something that you're into. So after that process was over, we went to the task of miniaturizing it,

and this is our first board design of our smallest board so far, and that biggest square right there next to the four pins is a Nordic chip, and it is a microprocessor and Bluetooth

chip, and it is four millimeters by four millimeters, which is crazy. That is so small, you could eat it and no one would know. You might not even notice, and you learn so much while you're doing this stuff. Like those four pins right there, what they do is charge. They also upload code, so one thing that was important and kind of the

whole point of this project is making these things open source, right, because we want the girls to get used to kind of programming logic of if I'm with Karen and I'm with Stacy, then behave this way, but what we really want is to give them something they love and let them

control it. Like what if they want to program it to let them know when their dad's on his way to pick them up, or to tell them when they have a new Instagram follower, or you could use it to control a drone, like really whatever you wanted to do. So these four pins both charge the device and upload code from the Arduino IDE, which is what you can use to program it.

So this is the board in action compared to a quarter. It's a little bigger than a quarter. We're now iterating on our next version of this. It's going to be about 10 millimeters smaller, so smaller than a quarter is our goal,

but the neat thing is is now we have this guy, which is awesome. It's been pretty rewarding, and I have a bunch of these guys here if you guys want to check them out, and we can also put them in the flowers, which will ultimately be what these girls are

wearing, and make it do all kinds of cool stuff. So that's been a really long process. That's been a year and a half, and since then started a company, got funded,

hired some friends, which is awesome, and have been working on this process, and our hopes now are to ship, you know, all these. I on Kickstarter like two and a half years ago, I paid

like 250 dollars for a VR goggles that I have still not gotten, and the lead time on hardware is super real. It's just the things that can go wrong are crazy. We're lucky to have some awesome manufacturers. They make Beats by Dre and Apple products, and

we're lucky to have them working with us. Our hopes are to ship most likely by next spring. It'd be great if we could do it by the end of this year, but it's been a really awesome process, and so one thing you'll see, one thing that we're doing is listening to our users.

The original name was Juliebots. They were like, we're not eight years old. That sounds really young. We were like, all right, well, what do you think of Jewelbots? So we have rebranded, and now we're Jewelbots. It's been an awesome process. I wouldn't trade it for anything. When I

first started learning software, it was, and maybe you can relate to this, it was an amazing experience in the way that I was always challenged. There was always something new I wanted to learn. So many times I would sit there and have that aha moment after 10 hours of just

running my head into a wall, and then my career advanced, and I got to do other things, and it got easier, and then I became a people manager, which is its own challenge, but now that I'm back in hardware, I'm experiencing that thing all over again, where I sit there for 10 hours,

and I'm learning something I haven't done in so long, and I get that same rush of this is incredible. I'm learning this whole new field. That's something that's growing so quickly. It's been an awesome experience. So check us out. Check out. One thing I encourage you, if you check out our website is look at our about page. We're an awesome team. I've known

these people for years, something I realized today, and it is an incredibly great reward to work with them, and we're hiring mechanical engineers and electrical engineers, if you know of anyone, but that's Julie Boss, or Jewel Boss, rather, and that's me. That's my story, but so when I got asked to do this, I thought, what would these folks want to see?

What would be the most exciting thing? So I was like, I should talk a little bit about what my journey has been, but we should also do something really crazy, and I was like, what can we do that's really crazy? Well, I know this awesome place called Flatiron School. Flatiron School

is a school in New York started and run by my good friend Avi Flombaum and his friend Adam Enbar, and I was lucky enough to work with them for a while, and they have an awesome kids program. It's a pre-college program where they teach a lot of awesome kids, and I was

like, you know, maybe we can, I bet we could bring some kids to RailsConf. I keep calling them kids. They're like adults, but I keep calling them kids. Maybe we can bring some of them to RailsConf and do something crazy. I don't know. I don't know what we'll do, but we'll do some kind of show for the people at RailsConf, and so I went and I talked to Adam, and I was

like, listen, I have this crazy idea. What do you think of this? And he was like, this sounds amazing. Let's do it, and I was like, all right, awesome. That's great. So since then, I've been getting together with this awesome, we put the word out to about 10 students, and three of them have been religiously showing up and contributing to each time we get together

for hack sessions, and have been a great source of inspiration. Recently, I forgot that, you know, they started to feel like peers because we've been working together for so long until about a week and a half ago when one of them who will go unnamed said, we're trying to figure out a song for this presentation, and they were like,

wait, these people are into Git. Have you seen that Geico commercial where those people are like, push it. Push it real good. And I was like, well, that's salt and pepper, and I still have that tape. But they've been awesome to work with, and I'm super excited

to introduce you to them. Come on up, Caroline, Guwam, and Malachi. My name is Guwam and Caroline. This is Malachi, and we go to the Flatiron School in New York

City, Manhattan. And a little bit about us is, well, this is me, of course.

So my name, I'm a student at Ralph R. McKee High School. It's in technical school, and I basically went to this school to learn automotive. When I went there, it basically, I was in an honors class, so they offered me another shop. So I took software engineering, and when I was in software engineering, this is basically what introduced me to the world of

coding, everywhere. So I started off with the basics, Scratch, HTML, CSS, Java, and I really got good at it. I really liked it, so I took it to the sophomore year. In sophomore year, I got a chance to go to, I got a scholarship, basically, to go to the

Flatiron School, and I accepted it, of course, and it's in Manhattan. Oh, it's over there. And basically, so I would have to take a ferry here to go to school, but it was worth it. We learned so much here. We learned Ruby and Ruby Advanced, basically, so now we're building applications here. All right, so this was a 12-week course,

every Wednesday for four hours, and basically, at the end of this semester, I was able to create a quiz that would allow anyone to go online and take a quiz to test their knowledge about cars. So this is how the quiz looks online. Over there again. All right,

so yeah, it was a great experience, and I'm gonna hand it off to Caroline. Hi, my name is Caroline. I also, we take the same class at the Flatiron School, and so freshman year, I took Latin at school, and I didn't really like it, so I was looking at

other, like, different electives. So sophomore year, I chose to take art and computer applications to see, like, which one I kind of liked better, which area I should get into, and computer applications was much better. Like, I liked it more, and it was like a super easy A, so junior year, just being honest, and so junior year,

I was like, okay, I should take computer science. It's in the same area, I guess, and I was scared because computer science is such a scary, like, two words. Like, it's just so intimidating, but I took it because it had algebra in it,

and I like, I liked algebra. I'll take it. So junior year, I took, I took computer science, and I just, like, loved it so much, and so I was like, this was junior year, so I was, like, looking at colleges and stuff, and so I was like, okay, maybe I should major in computer science, but I wanted to get, like, a little bit more serious about it, so I looked up classes in the city, and I found the Flatiron School, and I took classes there. I loved it

so much, and I made the monogram maker, where you could enter your initials, and enter a pattern, and a font, and the colors, and it makes a little monogram for you, so that's what I did, and I'm going to hand it off to Malachi. Hello. Wait, can people hear me good? Hello?

Okay, I just want to take a moment and, like, say how cool it is to just have my face, just, like, on these two giant, like, just projective screens. Like, I just love that. It's awesome. Okay, so I'm Malachi, and I go to the Academy of Innovative Technology

in Brooklyn. My school's actually, like, on the border of Brooklyn and Queens, so that's a little fun tidbit. Yeah, that's the school, and I took a web design class, and actually my school offered a few CTE classes, like, there was computer repair, there was flash animation, but web design was the one that interested me the most,

and it's actually what got me into coding. I started with, you know, like, HTML, CSS in my freshman and sophomore years, and then in my junior year, right now, I did some JavaScript, and it was pretty cool, and actually one of my friends from my school,

he interned at the Flatiron School over the summer, and he got me and a few other friends from my school a scholarship at the Flatiron School. Oh yeah, this was the program I used in my school, Dreamweaver, where, like, I started, and it's kind of funny how, like, when I look at Dreamweaver now that I actually just, like, code,

it's weird, just not familiar with me at all anymore, but yeah, he got us a scholarship at the Flatiron School, I was in the same class with G, we, it was, what, 12 weeks, and it's pretty cool, because here we learned Ruby, and it's similar to JavaScript, but it kind of

messes you up, because you're like, hey, I'm gonna try to do this, and I was like, wait, no, that's a Ruby thing, and then you go to JavaScript, and you're like, that doesn't work, I don't know why, and then you remember, hey, wrong language, so yeah, I have that to look

forward to, so yeah, we went to the Flatiron School, and this was a project that me and my friend Jevon worked on, who, it was, which rule are you, and it was kind of like a little, like, quiz, and it was like, hey, you know, like, you took your personality, and, oh yeah,

the front page, like, changes, like, every time you refresh it, but this is only a screenshot, like, there's one with a grape, it's like, hey, you have a grape personality, I love it, click right now, these are great, and yeah, so we both, after we completed the class, we got invited again to take an advanced course, and that's what we're doing right now, and

I love the Flatiron School, it's pretty great, and it's cool, because, you know, thanks to this place, I get to, like, oh no, I'll fix that later, I can come to Atlanta, and present at RailsConf, which I didn't even know was a thing until, like, a month ago, yeah.

One second, don't you just hate when your finger scanner doesn't work? No. Yes, so we basically used the Node.js client to control ParaAR drones, these drones include

a camera on the front, and they represent, the front and back of these drones are represented by LEDs, two green LEDs in the front, and two red in the back, and these drones can be controlled one of two ways, one is through mobile applications, and second is through the terminal

using a Node.js library called ARDrone. So we had a lot of difficulty working with the drones, one of them was that they would crash a lot, they were really unpredictable, they would go into ceilings and walls and stuff like that, and another was, like, working with

JavaScript and Ruby, it was hard to, like, adjust to the languages and stuff like that, so that was some things we had to adjust to. Yeah, I guess another one of the issues was, I guess, the library of commands we were using, because we got a bunch of, like, the commands that we used to make, you know, drones do all the cool stuff from NodeCopter, and some of the commands are, like, really cool, and we

wanted to use them, but we try, and you'd be like, hey, that one makes the drone crash into walls, we shouldn't show that one off. So, yeah, so we had to decide, hey, you know, which ones go together, you know, well. Oh, another one was momentum is a thing that can mess up drones. So, like, you know, we'd be like, hey, let's make the drone go right,

and it'd go right, and then be like, okay, then go left, like, media after, and it wouldn't go left, because it's, like, tilting towards the side, and it's like, that's not what we want you to do, you're gonna crash into the wall. As you can tell, there was a lot of crashing into walls. So, yeah.

Another problem we faced was getting more than one drone to do exactly the same thing. Like, sometimes we would run our code, and one drone would be, like, attacking one of the students at the Flatiron School, while another,

repeatedly crashing into students at the Flatiron School, and others would just, they would do crazy things. So, and, like, Jovan, I mean, Malachi mentioned earlier, the syntax, the curly brackets and semicolons, if you would even miss one, this thing was not gonna work. So, well, now we'll introduce these dancing drones. Oh, yeah, one sec.

So, here was a little snippet of the code we used, the function cha-cha. So, yeah, so right here was the drone, after, like, four seconds, it would start one of the commands,

the theta dance, and then after that we'd have to include a stop, because, like I mentioned earlier, the momentum, if it doesn't stop, what we want to happen won't work, and it'll just, you know, crash. I'm not sure how many times I've said that already, but, you know, and then, yeah, so then it'd just continue on to the next step after that,

stop more, and then we just keep going through each of the different functions that we made to make the drones look so cool performing in this giant place. Yeah. All right, so enough of us, and let's see some drones. All right, so this is a hardware demo, so anything could go wrong. We have a video

back up if it does. All right, hold on, can we get the, I'm gonna stop sharing on the screen so I can play. Can we go to the RailsConf display, or maybe I can just stop screen sharing.

Oh, nice, thanks. Okay, all right, let's do it. I have it. We want to give a big thanks to

Stephanie Coleman from Flatiron School, who has been at every practice with us, who has been supporting this whole process, and have come here to hang with us at RailsConf.

Let's hear it for Stephanie, here for these guys.