How I built a robotic Etch-a-Sketch that can be controlled from anywhere. For the last year, I’ve been working on a side project at home which I call Escher. It’s a robotic Etch-a-Sketch that can be controlled over the Internet from anywhere in the world. It’s made possible by the…

Joining a startup after years in Big Tech has been a breath of fresh air. — A little more than three months ago, I left a long-time position at Google (as head of the Chrome Mobile teams in Seattle and Kirkland) to join Xnor.ai, an early-stage startup developing AI for embedded devices. …

Building a camera-based person counter using Xnor’s AI2GO platform — My new employer, Xnor.ai, develops deep learning AI models that run efficiently on low-power CPUs and microcontrollers, including the Cortex ARM processor on the Raspberry Pi. No GPU or TPU needed! In this post, I’m going to walk though how to use Xnor’s AI2GO platform to build a Raspberry Pi-based…

A few strategies from a long-time Google engineer and manager. Over my eight-plus years at Google, leading a fairly large and successful team, I’ve developed a set of principles that are core to my own approach to management. Since I’m about to leave Google for a startup, I thought now…

A long-time Googler jumps out of the frying pan and into the fire. After more than eight and a half years as an engineer and manager at Google, I’ve decided to tackle a new challenge by joining XNOR.ai, an early-stage startup developing AI for embedded devices. …

In which we support multiple firmware versions. If you’re like me, you are incredibly lazy. This means not wanting to run around plugging cables into your Internet-connected Arduino devices when they should be able to pull new firmware over the air. …

We don’t need no stinking cables! In my last post, I talked about how you can use Google Firebase to control an Internet-connect Arduino project without running any servers at all — all of the data is hosted by Firebase. In this article, I’ll talk about how you can use…

I have seen the light, and it is Firebase. Here at Team Sidney Enterprises, we wanted to develop a programmable light display for our house for the holidays — consisting of Arduino-controlled RGB LED strips that can be programmed to display arbitrary patterns (rainbows, sparkles, seizure-inducing strobes, you name it)…