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Welcome to the CircuitPython Show.

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I'm your host, Paul Cutler.

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This episode I welcome John Ellis.

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When John was six, his career ambition was to work part-time building robots and part-time

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working at McDonald's.

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Even in the 90s, he understood the practical duplicity of hacking as a passion while working

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a corporate job to get the drop on the latest Happy Meal toys.

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It guides him to this day.

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John started working on Apple IIe's in the only computer lab in his rural community,

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which luckily was run by his mother.

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He started by writing text adventures in BASIC and fixing floppy drives he had broken, sometimes

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using typewriter parts to get mechanical pieces to work.

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This grew into a career that required a mix of hardware and software hacking, even as

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the infrastructure moved to the cloud.

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Currently John is the CTO of the non-profit Indiana Tech for Progress, which finds ways

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to leverage technology in order to increase civic engagement on a local level.

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projects on his workbench include a Keurig that briefly caught fire, an

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intelligent but retro alarm clock for his kids, a continually broken SNES

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controller, and a Bluetooth controlled lamp made from a bottle of a since

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closed brewery. John, welcome to the show. Paul, thanks for having me and

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congratulations on the new season as well. Thanks. How did you first get

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started with computers and electronics? So my story, and it's a lot like your

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previous guests as well started back in the 80s but it really started with my

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mother being the inspiration. So we were, as a lot of your guests were too, in

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rural parts of the country. I was in rural Midwest. My mom wanted to find a

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job at a local optometrist office and they asked her if she knew computers. If

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she could work the fancy spreadsheet programs that they were trying to begin

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to use. She had no idea but one important lesson that she passed on to me was say

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yes and step outside of your comfort zone. So she said yes and learned how to navigate an Apple II.

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And then when she went back to teaching, they asked again, "Do you have any experience with

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computers?" She said, "Oh yeah, absolutely. I had to do some minor repairs and work on the Apple II."

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They were like, "Great! We have a grant from the state to start the first computer lab here in the

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southern part of the state and we need someone to run it. None of the teachers know how to."

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So she said, "Yeah, sure, I'll run it."

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And so she got an extra large classroom filled with, I believe, over a dozen

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Apple IIe's, and I even had Koala pads.

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I had multiple dot matrix printers.

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It was fantastic.

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And so that's where I would spend my afterschool, before school, and summers

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was in this completely geeked out mad scientist lab, which was her classroom

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and often breaking things and then I had to figure out how to repair it, often with typewriter supplies.

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I did that famously to several floppy disk drives that she had. But also she would get in new

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software, so Broderbund wanted her to try out this new thing called Oregon Trail. They wanted

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her to try out the koala pads for this lab. And so from there I started to kind of learn how to

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not only use and implement the software and fix things, but also how to write my own text adventures.

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And from there, it kind of evolved into

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I knew how to repair, I knew how to fix, I knew how to work on these things.

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And I was surprised that people would actually pay me

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as I got into middle school to fix their computers

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and for small businesses, and that became a thing.

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And then after all, I was like, this could actually become

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a living where I could code, where I could write my own stuff, but I never knew quite

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how to angle that.

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And so I got involved in the startup scene here in the Midwest.

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One of the first ones was a company called ChaCha, which was you could text any question

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to their SMS number and get an answer back.

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It was a lot of people trying to cheat on tests, but also was Chuck Norris jokes.

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So I wrote an early, kind of not really AI bot, but the best facsimile I could come up

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with is like, human people are receiving these questions and answer, could I auto answer

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them back somehow?

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And that kind of gave me the bug on modern software as well as software as a service

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and cloud platforms and how to continue to grow and build these platforms.

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And that's where it's gone ever since then.

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But my roots and kind of my heart has stayed in those smaller machines where you can hack

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on not just the software, but the electronics itself.

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- You mentioned the KoalaPad,

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and I totally forgot about that until you said that,

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and it took me right back to being a kid again,

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playing with Apple IIs in a classroom environment.

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- I mean, it was amazing what they could do with so little.

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And that's another thing that's still with me today,

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you know, when working on like Trinkets or the M0s

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or the ESP32s, right?

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The Apple II was, and the IIes,

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were fairly simplistic in what they could do,

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but they had touchpad interfaces.

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They had all the modern trappings that we enjoy today,

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and they were able to do it with much fewer resources

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than what we've got right now.

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- One of my favorite questions to ask guests is,

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how did you get your handle Decker Ego?

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- So Decker Ego came out of Doom the game and id Software.

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So I was a big fan of John Carmack

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because it was amazing what he could do with,

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what he would say is high school math

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and then build an entire immersive environment around that.

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When John Romero released things like DoomEd

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and all of the hacking tools around it,

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I got super into not just playing Doom,

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but how do you hack it?

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How do you build new things with it?

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And thinking about the name of their studio,

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of id Software,

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I knew that was a kind of spin on Freud's id, ego,

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and super ego.

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So then I tried to take what I knew from Shadowrun,

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the RPG where you've got a Decker that has neural implants

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that lets them hack into the matrix and do whatever.

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So the Decker side of that cyberpunk universe,

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plus the opposite side, the rationality of ego

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as the post to id became Decker ego together.

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I love it.

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You've created a few different projects

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for the Adafruit MacroPad.

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My favorite is the MacroPad Hotkeys 2.

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What was your inspiration in creating the project?

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- So in truth, I have very low willpower

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when it comes to not buying things on Adafruit.

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And when I saw that the back plane of it

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had like the Pioneer 10 golden plaque on it,

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as well as the image of the probe itself,

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and then it had that array of, you know,

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the 12 keys with the NeoPixels behind it

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and rotary encoder.

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It's like, I've got to have it.

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And I bought two of them with no real impulse in mind

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other than this was a cool piece of hardware.

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But it immediately, of course, brought to mind,

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like all of the keyboards that we have now

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are missing a numpad.

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And I was thinking to all of the games that I used to have

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or all of the software that I used to have

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that would rely on that numpad.

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It drove me a little nuts that it was on the right side

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as opposed to the left.

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And so this was, it seemed like to me, a perfect idea to use that as an extension of ye old

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numpad from former days.

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And they already had a Learn tutorial out there for how to do just that, which was really

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cool but the LEDs stayed on all day.

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I often wanted to switch between No Man's Sky or Audacity on the macros that I had.

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And so I wanted to keep extending that and building that out.

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And a part of that also is I wanted to keep the same readability that I had with the code

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so that it could still be extended and modified by other people, but it wanted some additional

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features that made it a little bit easier to use.

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And so that's the genesis of that idea.

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And then I created a second version later when I started to get into DaVinci Resolve

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and using that.

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That has multiple pages within a single app.

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definitely need to learn a lot of the shortcuts and the hot keys to navigate

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that and do your workflow quickly. And so it was around the idea of a lot like

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with Blender you have one hand on the keys, one hand on the mouse, and you're

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able to navigate the UI together. And so that was the inspiration behind that and

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knowing that I'm never going to be able to exhaustively code all of the

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shortcuts and macros that someone's going to need. How do I make it easily

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usable in a studio environment, even with people who have minimal experience and

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exposure to programming with CircuitPython.

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Yeah, the MacroPad is probably my favorite product that Adafruit sells.

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And I even wrote the awesome guide for it to share all the different stuff out

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there and I featured yours at the top because I love it so much. And one of the

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things that I love about it is I experienced burn-in on my OLED screen.

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You added a timeout so that doesn't happen. How are you able to do that?

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Yeah, so it goes into a tiny little sleep

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and I think about that probably more than I should,

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but I think about not only not exhausting the LEDs

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and the displays that are out there,

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but how do you reduce the power consumption also

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so that it's not constantly polling

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and it's constantly trying to wait for input.

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So you'll see a little bit of lag as well

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when you try to get it to wake back up

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where you'll notice that the rotary encoder

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doesn't necessarily do it every time.

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It's 'cause I'm trying to be cognizant

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both power with extended sleep operations as well as having it be responsive also.

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I've been this way since I was a kid that I don't want to I want things to last forever

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perpetually be there I want to create time capsules out of everything and so that was

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part it wasn't it wasn't a huge technical issue in order to make that work on the

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MacroPad but with all of my projects I tried to add that sleep functionality

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still maintain state so that it isn't forgetting where it was at or where you were in the process

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and can easily resume where you left off as well. So when you code first with that sleep

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implementation it definitely makes things a lot easier because then you have to think about

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state management bringing it back and it's not complex to do as long as you start with that idea

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in mind. Tell me about another MacroPad project the MacroPad 4-chord MIDI. I saw in a hackaday

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where someone had come up with a MIDI controller that would recreate 90% of the pop songs out

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there with just four chords. And this is someone who had done their own custom PCB to make it look

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like a teeny little piano and with just I think it was seven buttons total because one was like

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to arpeggiate one was to change the tempo. You could recreate faithfully so many pop songs were

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out there and it tickled the logic programmer side of my brain of like, "Oh, this seems like

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procedurally you can generate a lot of music. That's kind of interesting." And if you look at

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the Adafruit Macro Pad, it's got three columns to it, which for a chord you have three notes to a

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chord and then you have four rows. So that's perfect for a four chord progression and that's

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idea came from was like watching that and then also watching the Axis of Awesome

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perform their four chord song where they go through a phalanx of like, I don't know,

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30 pop songs with just four chords, which was the inspiration for the earlier project.

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And it's like, this could be something really fun. And so it was really out of my own bemusement

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to say, all right, it's this is Kismet. We've got three notes, we've got four chords,

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That's perfect to the layout of the macro pad. Now, how do we make this work?

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I still want to do some tricks to that because I'd also like to add some things like

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drum beats to it or drum progressions

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I've that kind of got me on the path of like learning how Bjork used like I think is the Qy 20 of

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Like using these older electronics, you know that were based heavily on analog circuitry or those of the TR

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808 those old drum machines

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So like it got me on this old bent of again the old ways these old machines

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How they able to do so much with so little and I'd like to see if I can continue to weave that into the macro pad

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As well, that's pretty awesome

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You have a project that integrates with OBS. What does tally circuit pie do?

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Yeah, so tally circuit pie was actually born out of the kovat era

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when everyone was moving things to an online presence, right?

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And so Easter services were online,

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meetings were online, classrooms were online,

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and I started to help people out with that.

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I came in heavily masked with sanitary wipes

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and stuff like that.

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And then I found that a lot of people

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were gravitating towards OBS,

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which I had never heard of before,

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but got into and it was amazing.

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I couldn't believe this is something

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that was supported by the open source community,

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but of course sponsored by NVIDIA

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and some of the heavyweights as well.

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So I started to help people get that set up.

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And then of course you need kind of a multi-camera setup

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when you start to do larger services or organizations

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or even like town halls,

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'cause you need like a bail camera

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and then your closeup camera as well.

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But one thing that was tough was I would have myself

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and then maybe a camera operator.

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We wouldn't know which camera was on

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where should people should look and of course this has been solved back in the 60s right with tally lights

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you see what camera is on by the light shining on top of the camera and

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There were some solutions out there for OBS

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But I wanted to create an open source one out of just readily available hardware because also supply chain issues

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Let's just use what we got. I found a few people on Tindie who had crafted these matrix LED boards

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But also I've used some Raspberry Pis as well. And so there is a Tali Circuit Pi

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There's a Tali Pi which runs on a Raspberry Pi and then there's the Tali OBS repos

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All of which help you to orchestrate these lights and it is as simple as when you take to a camera

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That light shines red when you take away from it

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It goes back to blue when you have it in preview mode

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it goes to yellow and it was something you could with a 3d printer and with some hardware that you probably already have lying around

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You can make a way to have tally lights that are easily orchestrated

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Inside of OBS and so it's one of those small things that has been very handy and it has lasted these five years

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Without need to replace to repair really and still works with OBS to this day

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One of the products that Tally CircuitPy uses is by Seth Kerr, also known as Oak DevTech, which is no longer available.

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With something like that or with all the part shortages like you mentioned over the last few years,

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what role do you think CircuitPython can play to save or recycle hardware?

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It's a huge contrast, I feel, between a lot of commercial outfitters who are making things, let's say smart remotes or

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other gear where it is great, it is inspirational, it seems to work,

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but then they end of life it or they in support or there's an acquisition and

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then it just kind of goes off into the wind and you lose the ability to work with that hardware and

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You mentioned oak devs tech they did a you know, he did a great job with the board itself. We had great conversations on

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Heat tolerances and how to position things so that they don't melt the surface mounted, you know pieces

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And even though those boards aren't manufactured anymore

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CircuitPython has been a stable and reliable platform that keeps archives that work across

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all of these older platforms so that it stays alive. This has been in reliable use for me for

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the past five years. I bought some spare boards just in case, but in truth this has had greater

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longevity than a lot of the commercial hardware that I've bought. And so I feel like CircuitPython

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with its portability of code, but also the robustness in which the platform was created

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and maintained, it allows you to reliably use and then reuse a lot of hardware that may not be

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officially supported anymore. And if you can find an analog, something that is close to that,

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you can pretty easily port things over, either with the out-of-print libraries that they have

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around, you know, NeoPixels are become a universal standard almost, and it's fairly easy to port

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across hardware, as long as you know how big your array is. So it's easy to not only keep in life

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the things that you've got, but easily adapt to close analogs so that things continue to run.

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Last two questions I ask each guest. If someone wants to learn more about you and your work,

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where should they go?

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Oh man, that's a great question. I'm terrible at self-promotion,

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So I do have deckerego.net, which has a lot of tiny squares, which highlights either photography

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or the open source projects or the things that I've done from there.

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I'm going to continue to try to put out videos that showcase how these things work and

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are put together, because I do believe that just making things accessible

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and usable is a big boon for CircuitPython. So I want to encourage people to tinker,

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to set small electrical fires, get the magic smoke out every so often, not be afraid, right?

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And so decker.net showcases a lot of that.

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You'll see me as DeckerEgo on GitHub as well.

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I try to keep an honest and open list of my repositories,

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as well as those things that are archived as well.

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And then a number of guests for things

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that I've found along the way.

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- And the last question,

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you're starting a new project or prototype.

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Which board do you reach for?

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- You know, I, again, I have very poor impulse control

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when it comes to Autofruit stuff.

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So the Trinket M0s, I love.

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They're like, and they show them photographed right next to a fingernail, right?

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It's great.

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So they fit inside of bottles.

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They fit inside of all these tiny like antique enclosures.

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You can make all sorts of cool led blinky things with them.

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And I don't need that many pins really for a lot of the projects that I've got.

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So I love the M zeros and the trinkets there, but my challenge and my resolution

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for 2026, and we will see if I hold to it is to actually use the stuff that I've

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in my drawer today. I have some really weird AT stamps that I've got and I don't know what they

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even do or even how to flash them at this point, but I am resolved to figure out how to do that

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once again. I've got a number of ESP32s that are in a drawer back when someone discovered them in

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a light bulb, right? And then they started to just buy the components themselves and everyone was

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building their own little chipsets out of them. I've got a few of those as well.

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I have an old cortex that I want to figure out how to finally use.

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Everything needs to find...

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It's like the island of misfit toys in my electronics drawer.

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So I want to find them all a happy home before I start to open up my wallet and buy new stuff.

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That's a good resolution.

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I think we could all probably take advantage of that.

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Yes, put it to happy use and then they'll become Christmas presents.

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Who knows, by the end of the year.

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John, thanks so much for coming on the show.

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Absolutely.

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Thanks so much for having me.

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Thank you for listening to the CircuitPython Show.

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For show notes and transcripts, visit www.circuitpythonshow.com.

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Until next time, stay positive!