KEVIN:  All right.  Cool.  All right.  Can you hear me okay?  
Yeah?  So for a long time, for a couple years I had this great 
phone that Motorola made for the Third World called the 
MotofoneF3.  So you can't actually make exclamation points on 
there so that's why it says II con there there.  But that's the 
only downside.  It lasted for several weeks.  It's 
indeinstructable. but unfortunately, AT&T shut down their 2G 
network so I had to get a new phone.  So my options at the time 
were to get some kind of smartphone but I find these distracting 
and annoying and stuff, or to get another dumb phone but all of 
these are sort of cheap and plastic and stuff.  And so I decided 
to pursue the obvious solution, which is to build my own phone.  
And in particular what I wanted was a phone that matched the 
rest of the stuff that that I have or use every day.  Things 
like a bike, sunglasses, or a watch.  All of these things have a 
purpose but they have all sort of -- they had this aesthetic 
quality was that they were nice, and in ten years, they're still 
going to be nice.  It's not just like a gadgety technology 
thing.  So that's what I wanted to have out of a phone.  There's 
three things that I'm going to talk about.  There's some 
electronics stuff, some software stuff, and then some industrial 
design stuff.  All right.  So it's a phone.  Obviously you're 
going to need some electronics.  Luckily while I was in college 
I had a one-semester lab about electronics.  And --
[ Laughter ]
-- and as an example from my work at the time, I don't know if 
you can see my work down here, it says G minus.  So G minus is 
the kind of grade you get at a liberal arts college.  It stands 
for "good minus."  And its scale, it went through VG for "very 
good" and E for "excellent."  So G minus is basically a "D."  So 
this is actually how I made the electronics for this phone.  I 
knew that I needed some kind of cellular computer chip thingy to 
talk to the cell network and so I Googled around.  And I found 
this guy.  This is actually a photo from the press release.  So 
I mean, it's obviously going to be sick!
[ Laughter ]
So it came with, like, hundreds of pages of documentation.  So 
I'm kind of scrolling through this stuff and you can see that 
there's a lot of words...
          There's, like, these diagrams and these chip have all 
these pins and colors and stuff.  But you keep diving in, 
there's actually some kind of example, helpful example circuits. 
 So this is an example schematic for connecting two SIM card.  
And so the module is on the left and there's some resistors and 
stuff, and then some capacitors and then you connect them to the 
SIM card and I saw this schematic and was like, "looks good!" 
And then the same thing for the other stuff.  This is the 
antenna documentation.  This one's cooler because it has these 
blob things.  I have no idea what the fuck those are.  But you 
scroll down.  And you find this schematic.  So that's how I made 
those schematics.  I just copy and pasted everything.  I need a 
speaker and I, like, media microphone and here's an example of 
an application and I was like,"Looks good."  Of course that's 
only half the battle.  Once you have the schematic you have to 
have a circuit board and lay it out schematically.  So how I did 
this, I played Daft Punk really loud.  This is actually fun.  
You lay all these things out on a grid, and draw all these wires 
and connect them up and then you pay nice people 50 bucks and 
you get in the mail, some nice circuit boards.  So this was 
wire, this was just copper and fiberglass.  This was tricky 
because the components are really small.  This is a picture of a 
resistor on a quarter.  So the way that I did this, I got some 
tweezers.  So this is -- I just printed out, like, a map of the 
circuit board and then I kind of took all the components out of 
the really tiny packages and then put them on this map and then 
I sort of unpacked everything.  And it was really important, "Do 
not sneeze!" I'll never find these things again.  They're so 
small and what you do is, you get, like, this lead paste and 
it's actually like in this syringe.  So you syringe this on the 
exposed pads.  And this stuff is like this gooey stuff.  And 
it's sticky.  And you place them on lead glue.  But of course 
you have to solder it.  There's two schools of thought with 
this.  I went with the frying pan school of thought.  Some 
people use toaster ovens.  It was, like, super ghetto but it 
totally worked.  So that's how I made the hardware.  You just 
connect a bunch of things.  They don't necessarily do anything 
yet.  To do anything, you have to of course, add a tiny 
computer.  So the tiny computer has various responsibilities, 
detecting the button presses, having these chats about this 
other tiny computer like there's incoming calls and stuff like 
that.  So this is a tiny computer that I used.  It's actually 
related to a lot of the arduino stuff.  I'll point out a couple 
of things.  They're $8 in quantities of one.  If you buy a 
thousand, it's only $4.  I run it another 11 megahertz, which if 
you're running physical stuff, it's different.  You're running 
11 million things.  It's not slow in computer world but if 
you're thinking, I need to blink these lights on and off..."  
And then I needed 128 kilobytes of programming space, which is 
enough for about 1.4 jQuerys.  Of course, it's small, there's no 
operating system.  There's no thread.  There's no garbage 
collection unless you write your own garbage collector.  You 
can't run sweep because of course, you know, nothing else will 
happen.  You won't have call-backs.  So it's kind of a hostile, 
hostile environment.  So before I started programming I sort of 
planned all this stuff out using state charts.  This is a little 
picture of my notebook and I was basically just thinking 
through, if you're familiar with finance statement sheet 
diagrams it's a very similar kind of thing.  Just planning out, 
okay, the phone is idle.  And maybe an incoming phone happens, 
and it's going to transition into this lit state and then the 
ringing happens and then I press a button.  Or whatever.  So 
that's how I planned it out.  There's a great book I found about 
writing it out.  So if you're interested in this, I highly 
recommend this book.  So once you're at the software, you don't 
have a phone.  This is just a machine that will get you turned 
out of an airport.  You gotta put, like, this in a box, right?  
So that's the last part of my talk which is the industrial 
design stuff.  And again I started by just sketching out some 
stuff that I want in a phone and I don't actually have 
woodworking skills or anything like that.  And I said I wanted 
to keep it simple and basically I had a little box that would be 
made out of walnut and then would wrap the buttons with leather 
and to draw that out, I used this parametric design software.  
And it's really cool because you make a 2D sketch and then you 
extrude that sketch to make a 3D object.  And then paste new on 
that face.  And then you can extrude that again or cut that 
again and so you kind of go through this process of sketching 
and then building out features until you make a full 3D model of 
what you want.  And this stuff is really cool.  This was the 
first time I that played with this.  But it sort of makes emacs 
and Vim look really like kid's toys.  So anyway, I made this 
model.  But, you know, this is just a model on a computer.  I 
actually need to make this thing but you know, before anyone 
says, "3D printer."  I want to make this out of wood, which you 
can't print...
          If this is -- if there's any 1990 this project where I 
went to full on "crazy town" it would be here because this is 
when I bought a CNC.  It's basically like a robot drill.  I 
guess the speakers are not plugged in.  But it sounds exactly 
what you think it would -- it's like "wrr, wrr, wrr."  And 
supposedly it's accurate to, like, 6 microns which is insane.  
And of course, I'm working with wood.  But the best part of this 
machine was that it came with a hat!  I got this model and 
there's this whole nother world which is really cool about cam 
software about how you actually move this tool around to, like, 
rip out the different parts of material and, you know, if you 
have different sizes of tools there's different constraints 
about the stuff you can do.  It took me a while to sort of 
figure this stuff out.  So a lot of busting through different 
kinds of wood and I broke some of these really expensive drill 
bits but eventually I made a little model of this thing.  And 
this is MDF, which is -- and I was working with MDF because it 
was cheap.  And then I started working with bamboo and walnut 
and I think last week, this was basically to the point where I 
was at.  But thanks to the motivational power of conference 
talks, I managed to laser print, or, like, laser cut the surface 
and do some stuff out of walnut.  So if you want to see this 
come see this, and I have some other busted pieces and stuff.  
But I'm about 350 hours into this project, which, according to 
Malcom Gladwell that makes me a 3.5% expert.  Artisanal cell 
phones.  And from this position of authority, I want to leave 
y'all with one thing, which is that, making stuff is hard.  
Making stuff is really hard.  And it's been really cool learning 
about all these different things 'cause, like, now out in the 
world I kind of look at stuff in a different way about how did 
they make this thing?  How did they make this do that, and 
whatever.  And it's easy to get lost in the weeds with whatever. 
 There's all this stuff here, all this stuff there.  Things 
break and fly out of machines really fast.  But when you're out 
and deep and lost in the weeds one thing that I want to remind 
you guys to do is to just celebrate your victories.  So 
occasionally just try and step back, and, you know, look around 
and be pleased with yourself.  I was so pleased when I made 
those lights blinked.  That was the best thing ever.  I used 
this machine and I used it to cut this larger piece of wood to 
three smaller pieces of wood.  It's awesome.  So I want everyone 
here to try and go make something crazy and reach far but when 
you do that, when you get lost in the weeds, make sure you take 
time and step back and pat yourself on the back.  Thanks.
[ Applause ]