Around the beginning of a new year, I usually choose a topic that is related to the channel
and universal enough to be interesting for everybody’s life.
Today, it is the topic of “abstraction” and its influence on our electronics projects.
Understanding this topic also helps you decide on the next steps in your career.
Grüezi YouTubers.
Here is the guy with the Swiss accent.
With a new episode and fresh ideas around sensors and microcontrollers.
Remember: If you subscribe, you will always sit in the first row.
If you think, that such topics are not important for you, I can tell you that I thought the
same when I was young.
So, maybe you are brighter, and you stick to the end and then ask: What is in for me?
So, let’s start.
Abstraction, for me, is to move up to a higher level by understanding and simplifying the
lower level.
Combined with evolution, it forms the “abstraction ladder”.
Old people often complain that young people should learn the “basics” to be good.
For example, they should understand transistors or assembly language to be a good engineer
or programmer.
But is this true?
In the Stone Age, you were an “expert” if you were capable of creating a fire because
it was valuable and not easy.
Today, everybody driving an internal combustion engine creates 6000 fires every minute without
thinking and without any know-how.
An expert is maybe someone who can drive through a crowded city without an accident.
(6 cylinders x 1000rpm / 2 for a four-stroke engine = 3000
If we connect these two events with a ladder, it must have many rungs.
Stone Age experts knew things, and today’s experts know things but much higher on the
ladder.
Still, they need all the developments included in the different rungs of the ladder.
But, because they are “abstracted” into their tools and knowledge, they do not have
to care.
Valves or tubes were used in electronics before I became an engineer.
I started with transistors and assembly language, and I never learned how to use tubes, but
I was able to feed my children.
So every generation can cope with a main rung of knowledge.
Knowing the rung below is useful but not necessary.
If you know too many rungs, you are called a “historian”, not an engineer.
We also need people with knowledge on lower levels.
It is just no more mainstream and often paid less.
This is important for your career planning.
Young people have to focus on the highest rungs when they start because then it is easier
when their environment moves up the ladder during their lives.
There is also no big problem if you end on a lower rung when you are old.
In modern electronics, we had a few abstraction levels:
- Parts like resistors or transistors - Integrated circuits like the famous TTL
chips - Highly integrated chips like memory or CPUs
- Very highly integrated chips with different functions like microcontrollers or systems
on a chip where whole computers, including memory and I/O, are on one chip
Software advanced in similar steps together with the new possibilities hardware offered.
Each next level of abstraction drove down the cost, space, and power requirements and
increased the quality by factors.
One important “glue” between these levels is modules.
They exist on all levels and anticipate the next abstraction level because they assemble
or integrate lower-level parts to create a function on the next level.
If you want to see how this began, I suggest watching “Curious Marc’s” channel because
he works with a lot of stuff from the 1960s and 1970s, where you see parts, modules, and
some integrated circuits.
Before I started this channel in 2015, five trends came together to form a new rung on
the ladder of electronics: - A few years earlier, cheap microcontrollers
like the PIC or the ATmega328P came to market - The Arduino team created an ecosystem around
the ATmega328P with a standardized module, a standardized IDE, and a ton of libraries
- Chinese manufacturing, including shipping, became dirt cheap
- AliExpress created a trusted platform that enabled global trust, a topic I covered in
video #367 - YouTube became a free-of-charge learning
platform for this new world The result was that it was easier and cheaper
than ever to get into electronics and computing.
Suddenly, we were able to create projects not possible before.
And it did not cost us an arm and a leg.
This channel profited a lot because its timing was nearly perfect.
And I am one of the few who kept the energy level high.
So, I am still around.
Which abstraction layers were added during these years?
In the beginning, we connected a standard Arduino board to sensors or actuators like
LEDs or servos and wrote a lot of C++ code using the Arduino IDE and libraries, if available.
Sensors were already on modules to avoid soldering.
Later came the ESP8266.
It expanded the possibilities because we were able to integrate services from other devices
or from the internet into our projects.
The programming style roughly stayed the same, but the libraries became bigger.
Espressif understood the game and supported the Maker community where the innovation happened.
A lot of the Makers had a day job in a company where they introduced the new possibilities
learned with their hobby.
Together with us, Espressif grew to the dominant supplier of Wi-Fi-connected chips.
Our projects became bigger, also because we now had much more available memory and later,
with the ESP32, more GPIO pins.
We were ready for the next abstraction layer: Projects like Tasmota integrated and standardized
the C++ programming, the libraries, and the hardware we used before.
To get a working project, we only needed to buy the proper module and configure it to
our needs.
No programming was needed anymore.
Do you remember when the first Sonoffs replaced the Arduino and ESP development boards?
In the early days it was still necessary to install PlatformIO to do the configuration
and the uploading of the code to the device.
Later, this was replaced by the now-universal uploading via a browser.
Now, we no longer need to know anything about Arduino or libraries or Dupont wires or soldering
to build a remote switch, a sensor, or even a Meshtastic communicator.
Suppliers moved up the abstraction ladder, too, and integrated displays, battery management
systems, sensors, or radio chips on one board.
And often, they added a case.
The software integration ran in parallel with the hardware integration.
Some suppliers overdid it when they added proprietary clouds.
We never accepted them and always replaced the cloud code on the purchased hardware.
Also, on this channel, programming became less important.
Finding an interesting project that was supported by a community and served a particular purpose
became more important.
Like the Arduino ecosystem on the lower level, it reduced the effort to achieve our project
goals and increased our fun.
Good examples were TinyGS, or the Farm Data Relay System.
The next level came with the Raspberry Pi and Linux.
Because of Wi-Fi, we were able to integrate all we had built before.
Again, the new level integrated the former levels and made them easier and faster to
use.
Back then, the Raspberries were affordable and extremely more powerful than our microcontrollers
because they had big screens, unlimited storage capabilities, and very powerful open-source
software.
With MQTT as the universal integration layer, Node-Red, InfluxDB, and Grafana, we were able
to create projects not possible before.
But it came at a price: We had to learn a lot!
Linux is a very different rung on the ladder.
Again, a new project came to the rescue: IOTstack, which made it easy to install all these programs
and more with a few keystrokes.
On this level, we were able to buy or build sensors and actuators, flash them with Tasmota,
and integrate them with our Raspberry Pi.
The need for programming with the Arduino IDE was reduced, but we had to learn Linux,
Node-Red, InfluxDB, and Grafana.
And a whole bunch of other topics like backup and restore or uninterruptable power supply
for our Pis.
You see, again, we moved up the ladder of abstraction.
Everything we learned and used in 2015 was still here but covered under the hood.
And a lot of new features and knowledge came with this move.
In parallel came also LoRa and The Things Network.
It enabled us to connect remote sensors to our Raspberry Pi and so extended our range
considerably.
Maybe you remember my world record seven years ago, where I bridged more than 200km between
a simple LoRa module and a TTN gateway.
This, like Wi-Fi, was not a new abstraction level.
It just extended the possibilities on the same level.
The next move up on the ladder of abstraction was Home Assistant.
It started similarly to other projects like Tasmota but on the level of Linux.
In the beginning, it did not offer anything we did not already have.
But over the years, it became the de facto standard.
And what we had already done for years got a new name: Home Automation.
With this trend, we now get a ton of “Home Assistant-compatible” sensors and actuators.
The same as we saw with “Arduino compatible” and “Raspberry Pi compatible” a few years
ago.
This is always the proof that we have arrived at a new rung on the abstraction ladder.
On this new layer, new YouTube channels appeared.
Most of them have no clue about the lower levels, like microcontrollers, programming,
or even transistors.
Still, they attract a lot of views because they provide a lot of good know-how.
A new hobby on a higher level emerged.
And a new class of content came about at the same time: Entertainment channels that focus
on technical sensations.
What happens with channels like mine that existed before Home Assistant?
The competition for your attention is no longer on the same level; it is on the abstraction
level above.
The same happened to channels like the EEVblog a few years ago.
And the same happens or happened to Tech companies.
A lot of them are not made obsolete by their competitors but by new entrants.
Just watch what Tesla currently does with the proud car manufacturers…
What is the next level in our area?
For me, it is the “Homelab”, a combination of everything we already discussed, plus virtualization
and networking.
The proof that it includes everything from before: My virtual machines run IOTstack and
Home Assistant.
And all my sensors and actuators are still integrated and working.
But I got a lot of new possibilities because I now can run other Linux projects on the
same machine.
By creating virtual local networks, I can separate traffic and build performing network
access from outside my home.
Many things we did a few years earlier and on a lower abstraction layer with our ESPs.
One price I had to pay was to leave the Raspberry Pi behind.
It is still used in other projects like the Balloon Tracker.
But for Homelabs, small form factor PCs are the better choice.
They offer more performance and memory.
And Intel compatibility is important on this level, too.
Will this channel move up the ladder, too?
Yes and no.
Yes, because I definitively love the new possibilities and my channel also has to reflect my hobby.
And no, because I will keep some of the lower-level stuff and not create hard-core networks or
Linux videos.
I know where I came from and try to focus on people who did the same journey I described
in the last minutes.
Because we have different needs.
This channel will be a multi-rung, hardcore electronics channel where you not only see
the upper levels but also get to levels below.
Here, I have the advantage that I started my career with transistors, radios and antennas,
and integrated circuits.
Some of the next videos are, for example, about how to get USB-C working behind the
glossy paper, about how we can use GPS precision positioning and a video about NB-IOT and LTE-M.
The latter is a promise from more than six years ago when I decided to stop covering
cellular modems because 2G was on its way down.
Back then, I did not think that it would take till 2024 for the next video.
However, with reasonable pricing, cellular became a valid alternative to LoRa etc.
We started in the Stone Age and focused on the lifetime of this channel to understand
one important thing: Each generation has the same amount of knowledge
because it is limited by the human brain.
However, the knowledge of each generation is higher on the abstraction ladder.
So, if you think that young people or “digital natives” do not know enough, be proud that
you still know the lower levels and help them where you can.
And ask them for advice on the higher levels.
I am sure they are willing to help.
This is the secret behind this channel.
Many friends and sometimes also strangers help me to reach the next level.
I try to help others on the lower levels where I know more because I am already old.
Maybe a recipe for your life?
I can guarantee that is a good one!
Because this is a special video, I want to thank the special people who continuously
support the channel on Patreon and viewers using my links for their purchases.
Without you, it would be difficult for me to do what I do now.
With this in mind, I wish you a successful 2024 with lots of learning and even more fun!
Bye