On 12th January, 2014, I registered the domain – theembeddedkitchen.net. February 6th (2014) was when I published the first article on this website and opened the gates of The Embedded Kitchen to the whole world. I imagined myself as a chef baking circuit boards in a reflow oven and serving it fresh to the world, although tbh I would not be able to serve as I would have ideally wanted to serve :), but, a good thing is that I have also learnt over the years is to also cook food for humans too in a real kitchen, not just electronics in my embedded kitchen.
3 years have gone by since I published my last post and had changed companies and fields (I went on to work for Google, and have now completed 3 years in my role, learnt a lot but didn’t have time, nor the authorization to share specifics). I felt an update was overdue on the website, and how it will evolve in the years to come. So here we go.
A supplementary website – kumarabhishek.me
Rather than expanding The Embedded Kitchen to add other aspects of my personal life, I will be dedicating this site exclusively to my engineering, and especially electronics pursuits leaving the other bits at my personal website – which I would like to introduce readers to today – please say hi to kumarabhishek.me!
Although technology is what defines me professionally, if you want to know the person behind all this and see beyond the tech side of yours truly, you are more than welcome to visit, browse along the articles and also consider subscribing via email to receive new posts as they are published (I run it on a Ghost instance).
Viewership
My website has seen modest viewership, and has not had too much attention so far. While everyone has the hope that their website or articles will go viral one day – the best I’ve gotten is some traffic from Hackaday when my articles on BeagleLogic got featured. In hindsight, having a small niche corner of the internet is good for less noise [and good Signal-to-Noise ratio], but I suppose – maybe the signal itself from this website isn’t too strong either but it’s okay so far as I don’t have to deal with things that distract me from official or personal work. Should this change in the future, I will revisit this.
Redesign / rehosting
“If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it.”
It’s interesting that the website has used only one theme since it was inaugurated. And I still like the theme today and do not want to mess with it. While WordPress itself updates, and so does this theme’s visual effects from time to time – the vibe has remained the same regardless. And I do not want it to change unless there is a very strong force to do so.
The website was hosted on shared hosting for a while, then shifted to RedHat OpenShift Platform-as-a-service when it had a very generous free quota (so I paid for the domain registration only, not the servers that ran the site). It came to an end some years later and I chose the least resistance path of moving this site as-is to a LAMP (PHP/MySQL) shared hosting solution. This is still cheaper than a monthly VPS today, so it’s fine for the traffic I receive as the goal is to just keep the lights on in here. Whether I have to crank up the lights up to floodlights in the future is something to be seen.
I did consider moving this to a static site somewhere in between but decided against it primarily due to the inertia / friction / link-breakage and unable to find a suitable replacement theme. If in the future the need comes to do so, I will consider it but for now I will just keep it as-is, not to break what’s already working.
What happened to BeagleLogic?
I feel this is a question that needs to be addressed as a lot of people [O(100s)] have filled up the interest form but I never got back to them over the past 6 years. I feel bad about it, about what BeagleLogic could have become had I nurtured and given it much more attention than I did. On my software engineering job today, I have learnt how important it is to have SLOs defined for issue responses, documentation, unit/integration testing and design patterns but I suppose I would have learnt these things anyway had I given enough attention to BeagleLogic and given it the proper hardware and software product engineering treatment, over time. You should not need to join a company to learn these things (yes, it does help to learn to label the phenomena and the terms of the profession) but it would have come as a natural part of the process. Part of it was also my unfortunate sadness that BeagleLogic if manufactured in low volumes would be too expensive for the raw performance it has (in getting the data out of the PRUs via USB/Ethernet – it would never achieve Gigabit throughput even if it got that 1Gbps PHY) that I wouldn’t buy it myself ($100) – but I’d have wanted to reach the $50 price point [today I know better and also that AliExpress prices are unsustainable unless you actually flood the market with generic stuff under different sellers], but I never gave my potential customers the chance to prove their need for BeagleLogic (and give me the confidence to take things forward) with their money by letting them back a group order – I apologize to have let you down. BeagleLogic also hasn’t had a proper community built around the codebase that would have made it self-sustaining, maybe these things will improve over time.
Last November, I gave a talk at the Hackaday Superconference on my attempt to recreate a BeagleLogic-like experience on a Raspberry Pi platform which, as of today, the Pi 4 can easily hit 1Gbps and saturate a USB3.0 SSD. I had thought that adding a Raspberry Pi Pico can replicate the PRU experience on the Pi, but it turned out to be pretty convoluted. I hope it works out.
I do have ideas for a spiritual successor to BeagleLogic. It’s called Meghaduta, literally meaning “messenger of the clouds” in Sanskrit. It is named after Kālidāsa’s lyric poem Meghadūta, and is intended to be a vendor-agnostic specification for accessing instrumentation data over RPCs as an online-first protocol, not compromising on performance. You will hear more on it in the days to come. BeagleLogic will become one of the boards that runs on the Meghaduta stack.
Also, the BeagleBoard.org community is going to be blessed with more boards, and I will be looking forward to get BeagleLogic to work with them and bring more discipline to the BeagleLogic project by establishing CI pipelines, Debian packages and all the good things.
More articles?
Content is the craze today. Everyone wants to be/is a content creator today. I’ve personally been more of a content consumer than a creator myself over the years, scrolling through X/Twitter, watching YouTube and other social media feeds. Maybe you’ll find yourself here after scrolling through a similar feed – and if you made it this far, thank you!
This year, I hope that I can give back more quality content than I consume. Either by reducing my content consumption, or creating more content, or both, or increasing both in some ratio, but still creating more content than content consumed.
My home country India is seeing more and more interest growing in the hardware sector, from manufacturing to semiconductor design. Yet we have a whole generation of engineers who may be (now over-[?])exposed to mass-scale DSA content, how to of product-based companies, coding, interview processes, web and app development using JavaScript and other frameworks but may not be aware of the variety, options and depth available to them in hardware. Be it analog/digital/mixed-signal chip design, antenna/RF design, circuit boards, protocol engineering – there is so much available to learn and think about and I believe simply opening one’s eyes to the possibilities are going to ignite the collective imagination a lot of young minds and make India a quality hardware hub. This is the direction I personally want to take The Embedded Kitchen now – an apprenticeship where you can come and learn to create electronics.
Summary
Thank you for sticking around and reading this! Do check out my alter ego site – kumarabhishek.me and consider subscribing there if you find something interesting. I hope that this corner of the internet continues to offer little and useful things. I feel lighter after having finally given a public reply of why I held back on BeagleLogic and I hope, that this hope is not like the previous hopes where I started working but gave up soon after. And finally, I feel like I am in a position to give back by encouraging a generation of future hardware engineers, and hopefully The Embedded Kitchen gets a role to play in this.