#645 – Moving Down The Stack with Scott Williams

Welcome back, Scott Williams of Xentronics!

• Scott was on Episode 624 talking to Dave about the business of consulting, but they discussed Scott coming back on to get more into the technical side of things.
• Chris listened to the episode and wondered if Scott would get more pulled into management of the day-to-day
• There’s a new program in Victoria (Australia) to enforce deposit/rebates on bottles and cans. This opened up an opportunity for an electronics project.
• Bin management is another common IoT project
• Industrial – Site Hive is a long-time customer in the construction space
• Consumer goods
• Scott said he’s likely to reach for a Raspberry Pi CM4 for quick prototyping/POC
• Wht about the high density Hirose connectors?
• Does Xentronics “go down the stack” by using tools like Buildroot / Yocto?
• Cameras make products much more difficult. Raspberry Pi cameras have a CSI interface but aren’t “standard” per se.
• When starting projects, Xentronics is likely to pull out ESP32 for WiFi, Nordic for Bluetooth, STM32 for generic processing
• Bare metal vs RTOS? Normally they start in the RTOS space to add things later
• Pre-made / prior art
• Colin Karpfinger of Punch Through, a firm that largely focuses on Bluetooth
• EMC resources/courses
  • PCEA educational EMC
  • Todd Hubing
  • Keith Armstrong
  • Ken Wyatt
  • Wurth seminar – Scott never got the recording, but will try again and we’ll update here/reddit if he gets it!