During summer 2023, I made a long-time dream come true when I rode my bicycle the length of Sweden. I've been fortunate to have ridden my bike all over the world, but Sweden holds a very special place in my heart. 25 years ago, I spent a very influential year of my young life as an exchange student in a small village called Svädala, and that's where I'm going. But it'll take a while, it's 1300 miles from where I'm starting this adventure. I created an in-depth series of videos about this journey, and I'll link them below. This video is a compilation of all the best moments, and includes only natural sounds. My goal is to bring you on this adventure so that you feel like you're with me, except you have the luxury of not dealing with the mosquitoes. My bike is the 600X, a low-maintenance adventure rig that I designed with my friends at priority bicycles. And here's my route, but just like any good adventure, it didn't turn out as planned. Okay, Ryan, let's do this. There's my bike, there's all my stuff. Here's me, here's Sweden, sun all day all night. Look at him, so cool, my first time ever seeing reindeer in real life, except in Christmas movies. Woo-hoo-hoo!  So there's this really cool thing in Sweden called Allemandsrätten, and it pretty much means you can camp anywhere you want. Maybe not in somebody's garden, but anywhere, which is really cool, and I've never taken advantage of it. I remember learning about it when I was an exchange student, and I thought that's fascinating because there aren't many places in the world like that where just all the land is open for people to recreate on, which is pretty cool. Okay, I've got a little protection now, and I put on bug juice. These mosquitoes in Sweden are hungry. I slept hard. Okay, all dressed up, ready to go. Let's hit the road. And the mosquitoes are already on my case. Slow going, I think. Holy moly. I really hope this doesn't last too long.  So I'm riding along here. I think I'm in the middle of nowhere, and I see these little beautiful red houses. And I walk in, and I ask for some vatten, and they're like, yes, of course you can have some vatten.  They are so nice. The trees are blocking a bit of the rain, which is nice. I'm singing in the rain, just riding my bike in the rain at the top of the world. I'm crawling up a steep hill, and the mosquitoes are all over me. Oh, man. This is not fun. I don't even care about the rain anymore. It's the mosquitoes. Huh. What am I doing? Where am I going? I don't know why, but there's no mosquitoes here. This mud is so wet. It feels like my tires are flat, and I'm just sinking in. I am going to treat myself to my favorite chocolate. I love this stuff. Here I am, day two. I think I went like 87 miles, and I was on my bike for 12 hours. I got on my bike at 9, and I finished just before 9 p.m. And I don't stop much.  I'm scared to go out of the tent in the morning. They're going to be waiting for me. Good morning, mosquitoes. I've missed you.  Peanut butter and Nutella, for sure. Summer in Sweden. So lovely. Midnight sun. I love it. Oh, God. Oh, God. Here we go. Here we go. No crashes. No flaties. No whammies. No mud. No rain. No mosquitoes. This is not fun. This is not fun anymore, but it will be fun at some point. Just not right now. That's a moose up there running across the road. No. This is not what I wanted to deal with today. Come on, buddy. Come on, buddy. OK, now I'm getting cold. Everything is soaked through. Yeah, that's when things get worrisome. You don't want to get too cold out here. So I'm trying to pedal as fast as I can just to keep my body temperature up, my core. This rain does not seem to be going anywhere. So here I am riding by my favorite red and white summer stugas, summer houses. And I knock on the door at this place. And I said, hey, is there any place to rent around here? And he says, yes. You can have this one. You are my hero. Thank you very much. You are very, very kind. Is it a normal weather right now? No, I've had very good weather all summer. Is it true? Yes, it is. It started raining yesterday. And now I've had 28 and 29 degrees. Which one do you think I have? And here I am in my very own little Swedish summer stuga. And they're just so generous and kind. He kept bringing towels and stuff. And he's like, come get lunch here pretty soon. And I am so happy to be out of that rain. Oh, man. This morning when I got on my bike and I was like, why am I doing this? Why am I continuing into this mess? This is why. For moments like this, this makes everything worth it. It makes everything so just so beautiful when you connect with awesome humans who are just willing to help immediately and knocked on the door. They're like, yeah, man, you can stay here. Didn't think twice about it. These are the moments when the pinion gearbox and the gate belt drive shine. All that mud and gunk and sand didn't stop me. You see all those? Those are mosquitoes that is so gross. They must have gotten in there when I was packing up my tent this morning.  Good morning. Guess what? It's not raining. Yes. Have a nice trip. And today I'm going to get off the European divide, ride some pavement. And the reason is because I don't want to get stuck in mud. I think it's still probably really wet. And my new friend, who I haven't met yet in real life, bike touring Mike is going to come meet me. Going to Avid's Yahr. That way, 60 miles. This might not last long, but I have sunshine on my arms and it feels so good. Check this out. I am at Sivila. It's a hamburger chain all over Sweden. And I usually don't come here because they don't have vegetarian options. But now they have a soy burger. And I'm so excited to be eating this. It's been a great day. And I'm celebrating with a soy burger. I cannot tell you how glorious this evening sun feels on my skin. Look at that. A white reindeer. Watch out for traffic. Sweden holds a very special place in my heart. And I'd always wanted to get to know it from north to south. And here I am. Making dreams come true. There he is! It's Mike! How you doing buddy? Good to see you. So my friends, I've been talking about bike touring Mike. Here he is in the flesh. We're going to ride bikes together. We're going to have fun. Tell everybody about your channel and what you do. Yeah. I mainly focus on trips around the Scandinavian countries up here in Sweden, Norway and Finland. But I also go on trips in Europe like France, Spain and so on. He said he has something special in his bag for me. What do you have? I have a couple of gifts for Ryan. He found these beans.  I couldn't find them and you brought them to me. Thank you. I also brought some Swedish. Oh, that's my favorite chocolate. Oh, you're the man. And the next trick is going to be getting in there without letting in a ton of mosquitoes. Let's see if I can do it. So I'm going to open it up a little bit and just kind of dive in really quick. Can I close it up really quick? I'm enjoying sitting here watching them try to get in my tent. Ha ha, suckers. Good morning, good morning. Check this out. It is so sunny. It's like a Colorado morning. I'm so excited. Good morning, Mike. Good morning. Do you have a day? Yes, yes. Yes, yes. We were just talking. We both graduated from high school the same year in Sweden, 1998. Good morning, reindeer. I can't believe it. Today is one of those days where you just got to keep stopping because it's so beautiful. Here it is, my friends. My first black bean Swedish burrito. And check it out. We found this awesome shelter in the creek just in time for lunch. I have a random question I just thought of. Before I came here, people warned me about bears. Is that something to be scared of here? That's a typical question for me living in Sweden. And like I told Ryan, I have never seen a bear like out in nature during my whole life. And in Sweden, we have about 3,000 brown bears. If you compare that to Canada, I think they have over 300,000. So there are really not that many bears here in Sweden. And most hopefully are pretty friendly. Yeah, they're like super kind Swedish bears. They invite you in for some honey. This is a veggie burger and I'm so excited to eat it. And I got a bucket of fries, a milkshake. Mike's got a burger, fries, milkshake. We are happy. Cheers, buddy. Cheers. Skål! Skål is how you say cheers in Swedish. I love the sound of birds in the morning. And also that. Woo-hoo! It is time for a breakfast in bed. Peanut butter, nutella, tortilla. Mmm. Goodbye, Elixela.  This is so steep. Hi, I'm going to eat this yummy falafel wrap. So good. Mikke just told me that that is the Sami flag. And that one, of course, is the Swedish flag. Hey, yes, Feria. Yeah, it's pretty incredible. Don't go too far. You're going to crash into the flowers. Look at that. Små grådra, små grådra, elustiga et se. Did we find a cool shelter next to a river? Oh, yeah. This is a deluxe shelter. Look at that. Here's Mikke making his own YouTube videos. Good morning. All right, Mike. It's going to have a great day. What do you say? These tree-lined roads. Stunning. It's so green. Birds are singing this morning. Sometimes when you're riding your bike. You know, I do love the sound of tires crunching on gravel, but I also like to stop and listen. It's got to sit there in the field of lupins and just look beautiful. A colorful modern apartment complex. And only in Sweden would there be a ski jump right in the middle of town. Look at that. Look at that. You trying to get my fries? Get out of here. Look at that. All plant-based. It's a spicy avocado burger. Check it out. We are now on a bike path. The sea is right there. We're paralleling the E4. We're coming up on the high coast bridge, the second longest bridge in Sweden after the really cool bridge from Malmö to Copenhagen that they built. When I was an exchange student, this is pretty exciting. Oh, you see that little cafe restaurant? We're going to camp right here. We've gone a few kilometers past the bridge. And it's time to be done for the day. We went 100 miles, maybe even a little bit more. I'm doing the... I got some pizza and I'm camped next to a lake. Happy dance, happy dance. And I'm jumping in that lake later. You know it. Look at that chili. Oh, man. Did I say life is good? It's good. It's real good. My friend, you're going home tomorrow. Yeah, we'll come to the end. We'll come to the end. My point of view anyway. Well, I can't thank you enough for all your help. It's been great to learn from you, learn more about Sweden, learn about the northern lands. And I've had a blast. I've been riding for three days and it feels like we've been here for at least a week. I know. So many things happen along the way. I know. You really get to know somebody really intimately when you ride next to them all day and then you wake up next to them and you're getting food together and you're navigating together and you're making decisions and we didn't know each other before this all came together and it's amazing how bikes can unify people, right? Yeah. Good night, Sweden. I love you. See you later, buddy. There he goes. My new Swedish friend. It's always hard for me to say goodbye. Even if I've only known somebody for three days, I really develop a connection and Mike's a good guy and I know I'll see him down the road. That's how this works. Thank you, beautiful campsite. I have about 700 miles to go. What do you think about that? Almost halfway, too. No crashes. No flaties. No whammies. Good morning, lupin flowers. How are we doing today? Just a little morning stop just to listen to the birds. Check out the lupins. Good morning, cows. What I just found on the side of the road. Maybe I can get that onto my bike somehow. That'd be fun, huh? Riding next to this lake, I saw it on the map and I'm just scanning for like an open area to camp. There's even a dock here. Oh, I'm totally camping here, even though it's on the side of a road. I know what it's time for, my pre-dinner treat.  Sunshine. I dig it. Thank you, beautiful lakeside camp spot. This one for some reason has a special place in my heart. I really like this one. Morning, cows. Good morning. This morning's goodies from the Ica supermarket. Bananas, a protein shake. I got some of these little French cheese ball things. Of course, my favorite protein bar. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Those clouds are starting to look like they're developing into something pretty mean. Oh boy. So it's gonna rain. This got rained now in about three seconds. And I just worked out a pretty sweet deal here at this campsite. There is my home for the night. I rented an RV. I slept so well. So well. Gosh, this is the best RV bed ever. It rained a lot last night. It's not raining now though. So this is what I'm looking at. Rain all day. And I'm looking forward. Rain till Tuesday. Good morning, Swedish cows. Oh, I'm feeling better. Mainly because it's dry and I'm dry. So I just made a boo boo. I tried to outsmart my route and I was like, oh, I can take this road. It'll be faster than the intended route. And then I looked on my phone and realized I was going the wrong way completely. Just goes to show you really have to pay attention to where you're going at times. Better watch out. Might be going to Finland. Oh, look what I just found. A little shelter. Ooh, with a very fancy piece of woodwork. I'm heading right for that darkness. Oh boy. The rain sounds really pretty in the forest. Sounds kind of like hitting all the leaves and the pine needles. There's a beauty in being out here alone on my bike in the rain. This tastes so good. I love all those protein bars and treats, but something special about warm food. Well, I found a roof. I was just riding by. Not many people are out. It's kind of late. And this guy was getting his mail and I just said, hey, is there anywhere around here I can sleep under just a roof or something? And we talked for a bit. And he's like, yeah, you can just sleep in our room here. The ute room. And so this is where I'm going to be for tonight. And I am very, very glad. Happy, happy, happy. We are from, from. Now I have friends in the valley. And we see each other again. You must greet me in Colorado sometime. It's going to be nice. Yes, it's going to be really nice. But have a good summer. It's not really a summer day today, but I'm going to come and something leave it. Skull. You can skull with a muffin, right? Oh boy. Look at that. Oh, it's a little bit of a dog. Hey, look at the cows. Hi cows. I've seen a lot of these guys smushed on the roads. And I don't want you to get hurt. Okay, I'm going to move you. I'm going to move you.  Yeah, buddy, you need to go to the forest so you don't become a toad pancake like all your buddies. Okay. Have a good day, buddy. It's so fun to hear the birds sing. You never hear a bird complaining. All their songs are beautiful, right? They're not complaining about the rain. Let's get back on our bike. There you are. Oh God, what happened? It started raining like crazy. It was so nice five minutes ago. I just took a hot shower. I probably stood in there longer than I should have, but man, it felt good. And the sweet lady who rents out this cabin just brought me a plate of pasta and four desserts. Another chocolate ball. When I buy these things, I don't just buy one, I buy multiple. So peaceful.  They're really scored.  Thank you, super cozy Swedish cabin for drying me out. Hey, look at these cuties. Hi guys. Back on dirt. Back in the school again. Forest. They, besides this beautiful little creek, a chocolate ball. It is chocolate ball time and chocolate balls make, they make everything better. See this cuteness? Lord, this is a score. So awesome. I can finally look at the map and say, hey, I'm getting there because for so long, it seemed impossibly far. Malmo was just so far away.  I just wanted to hug you. Thank you. You're so nice. It was really nice. Thank you Magnus. Yes, it was really nice. And we'll see you some other time in Sweden. I'll be back one day. You're welcome. Bye. Bye, bye. Glad Friday, July. Hey, hey. Bye. Bye. Once again, my heart is so happy. It really is. What wonderful people. So kind. So gentle. And I'm really glad they let me stay there because it was pretty cold and windy last night. I am really looking forward to today's ride because I get to ride along the edge of Lake Vätern which is one of Sweden's big famous beautiful lakes. And it should be pretty cool. Oh, it's so good to see you, Shadow. It's been a long time. At this point, I'm just kind of used to a little bit of rain every day. Or a lot bit. A bit about the history here. And it looks like this whole polka gris candy cane story was started in the mid-1800s from a woman named Amelia. Amelia Ericsson. And she started it up. And it's now a huge thing. People from all over Sweden know that this is the place to go to eat your polka gris. Mmm, it's kind of like a czar. Mmm. We're in short sleeves again today. You should never let a bike packer near a buffet breakfast. We will eat a lot. Swedish pancakes? Yes, please. Skål. You can see my nice long shadow. All right, let's have a great day. Let's do this. A little single track to start the day. That's nice. Ooh, fine. Branch just tried to take my helmet off. There's a nice one. Look at that. Look at that sunshine. Yes! You sweet-o! And Skål Sverige! Good, son. Love you. I think I can camp anywhere on this road. I am sitting in my tent. Happy as can be. Eating my nut mix and some other goodies. Just really happy. I'm so close. I'm going to finish this tomorrow. And it's incredible. I love this feeling. Okay, this is southern Sweden here. I am the blue dot. Finishing down in Malmö tomorrow. It's right across from Copenhagen, Denmark. Just to give you an idea. That's the bottom of Sweden. And the top of Sweden is way up there. I've come a long way. That's chilly. Thank you flat piece of ground. Moose crossing. It is so lush and green in here. I feel like I'm in a jungle. And these trees are protecting me from the rain. Thank you trees. Oh man. This might be my favorite part of the entire trip. Tunnel of green. Just taking it all in and enjoying every last bit of Sweden. Skål. You always got to start with the sweet stuff. Mmm. I'm going to wait here for my sister Sofia. She's on her way. Oh my god. That's a dog. We're going to cycle home today. Yes, we're going to cycle home. It's really happening. Hey summer time. Give me your dog. Give me your hand. Give me everything you want. And everything you can. Yeah.  Go, go. This might be the last one. First Malmo sign. I've seen on this entire trip. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. Look at these cute kids waiting for me. At this. Oh man. I'm so excited. I've been waiting for this. Look at all these wonderful humans here.  It says. This celebration, this glorious fun filled evening is exactly what motivated me to pedal as hard as I could when I was lying in my tent on those cold rainy nights. I owe so much to this wonderful family for opening my eyes to the world outside of Boulder, for loving their crazy American son as one of their own, and for inspiring my curiosity for travel and adventure. It was indeed destiny that brought me to Sweden into this amazing family. Oh, yeah, I love you. I love you. I love you. Hello my friends and thank you so much for watching this video. I really appreciate it. And like I said at the beginning, I made a series of videos about this adventure where you will get a lot more in depth detail about every single day of the trip, and a lot more of the interactions I had with the wonderful Swedes I met all along the way. And I will link that down below. I make adventure videos all over the world, bikepacking and ultra running. If you like that, please subscribe and tell your friends about my channel. And if you want to help keep this channel alive, please consider joining my Patreon where you can support me financially for as little as $3 a month. And what you will get is early release videos with no ads and all sorts of other fun stuff like direct access to me if you ever want to ask questions about anything. So I will link that down below as well and put the address right here, my Patreon page. And other than that, I hope you have a wonderful day and don't forget to get off your couch and get out there.


I'm Phil King, and it's 8-bit Redux microcontroller hacking. There's a few things I just need to say up front. I apologize if my demeanor is a little strange. My laptop sucks in more ways than I can possibly relate, so I'm actually going to be working off the same screen you're looking at. If this seems a little odd, I apologize. But to give you an idea of what's going on, who am I? I'm Phil King, and specifically I'm a hardware engineer right now who does a lot of embedded systems development. Actually I'm working on IR wireless networking at a place called NetSchools. I've also been a game developer and hardware enthusiast for at least 10 years now. And hopefully what you're going to get out of this is some of the fun that I've had with 8-bit system development. Who are you? To be getting anything particularly useful out of this, I sort of tried to develop a profile. You know the basics of electronics and electronic logic. This is why I ended up in the UberHexer track, just a prerequisite that you are at least familiar with some of the basic terms. You know how to code. Preferably in assembly language, for reasons I'm going to get to in a little more detail later, you believe that 1K is actually useful space. It is surprising how much you can do in 1K. It's surprising how few people do it anymore. As I'll get into the architecture of some specific examples, 1K is usually enough to do almost anything you want to do with an 8-bit embedded controller. Presumably you've built more software than hardware, which is hopefully why you're here to get something on my talk. And you know you could do this stuff if you could just get started. That's what I'm primarily hoping to do is direct you to get yourself set up with a small development environment, a lab, so you can play with this stuff. Basically I'll cover what are microcontrollers? How to set up your lab, how to get some parts, once you know what you want to be developing, some basic rules of thumb for building and debugging, an example project which I will just give a cursory overview of, and the traditional inspirational message that has to go to every talk. Things I won't be covering. You will not see a lot of architectural specific details. Anything that comes off a data sheet you can look up yourself and you don't need me reciting. There are literally thousands of different variations of microcontrollers and what you specifically need is going to depend on your application. I also will avoid religious arguments, which are usually tightly coupled to data sheet details. I'm not going to tell you how to write code, presumably you know that. I'm not going to tell you how to solder. I'm not going to tell you how to tell an alum from an app. If you aren't familiar with the terminology, don't give up, but I would encourage you to get some basic electronics text and just find out, just learn the vocabulary. I won't tell you how to use an O-scope and I won't tell you how to hack cell phones. These are from a different talk. Okay. Thank you. Sorry about that. So what do you find in a microcontroller? The one thing that unifies them is of course a processor core. The original 8-bit microprocessors that we're all familiar with, the Z80, the 6502 and so on, were self-contained devices that had an address and data bus and basically were unified, unified architecture processors that could do general purpose computing. Microcontrollers have taken those cores or later variants of them and embedded them on the same die with other resources. Specifically what usually denotes a microcontroller is that you will have some on board memory. And I know that it could be ROM, Flash, EE Prom. Something that's interesting is that some of the devices that are one-time programmable, which is to say they can only be programmed once, are actually erasable devices that just haven't put in a package that you can erase. Another thing you will find on microcontrollers is they generally don't have an address and data bus. They have programmable IO ports where you set port directions, you can twiddly IO pins, but all of the specific bus interactions are taking place inside the device. And then there's a library of peripherals that you'll find stuck on the most microcontrollers. The most common are U-Arts, A to D and D to A converters. So that you can do small, completely self-contained solutions. In fact, a lot of the smaller parts have an RC oscillator built into them so that you don't even need to clock them externally. You can actually set a bit when you're programming it to clock itself, usually at some nominal slower rate, but it becomes a self-contained device where you literally just add power and it twiddles the IOs to do your bidding. And why is this useful? You can create really cool, tiny little systems. It's really compelling when you have an 8-bit DIP package that's doing something that you told it to do. It's nice to create cool software projects, but there's something particularly gratifying about hardware. Ubiquity. One of my favorite comments on this was in a 1976 small computing conference at MIT, they were talking about how computers were going to become ubiquitous. But of course, there is a logical extension beyond which this will not go. For example, it's not like you need a microprocessor in every doorknob. If you've checked your door at the hotel here, there is in fact now a microprocessor in every doorknob. Low cost. Economies of scale are driving the cost of 8-bit microcontrollers into the floor, and it's great because you can buy individual parts for one to two bucks. Even the high-performance high-end 8-bit microcontrollers are seldom more than 10. And in large quantities, you will find that they replace random logic efficiently because some of the parts I've seen in super high-production quantities are as low as 40 cents a piece. You get surprisingly high performance. CMOS can go really fast, even if you're only shuffling 8 bits at a time. There's a company called Cinex, for example, that makes a 100-megahertz 8-bit microcontroller. And then simply scalability. There is a huge design space you get to play in. What do you not get? You don't get lots of memory. As I was saying, 1K of code space is a usable and fairly typical amount. This isn't to say you can't get a lot of memory. You can buy microcontrollers that have 128K of code space on them. But unless you're doing something that really needs to be moving, that really needs that large an image, you're probably missing part of the point. And so I encourage you to know your code. Beware of compiler assumptions, and then recursion versus the two-deep stack. One of the nice things about playing with the microcontrollers is you get to know about what's going on at the metal level. In the AVR microcontroller, which is one that I'm using right now, the lower end versions have a separate, it's called a Harvard architecture. So you have a separate code and data space. And the two don't meet. And they've actually implemented the stack as a third separate hardware data space. It's only three elements deep. If you try to recurse with only a three-deep stack, you're going to be in trouble. And then finally, like I said, you don't have typically a complex memory interface. A lot of microcontrollers have only a low port. If you want to get something in and out of an external memory, you actually twiddle the address and data lines manually. There are some microcontrollers that let you assign some of the ports to be a memory interface. But even in that case, they make assumptions, for example, they own the memory. In even the old 6502, you had a memory-ready indicator so that you could hold off memory accesses, which would allow you to have a DRAM subsystem or something like that. So you want to set up your lab. What are you going to need? What are you going to want? You're going to want a 128-channel logic analyzer, a 4-channel, 2-gigahertz oscilloscope, a full system ice, and universal device programmer. After you've laid out your $38,000, what do you really need? You need a digital multimeter. You can spend a lot of money on a digital multimeter. You don't have to. This is a RadioShack special. It does 90% of everything you'll ever need. It's normally, I think, $22. I got it on sale for $16. It's accurate to 5%. It tells you what voltages are. All it does is extend your senses to be able to tell are two points electrically connected together. Is there a voltage across two points? It does most of what you need at a $100 flux scope. A logic probe is just an LED on a stick that tells you the state of a pin. The reason it's useful is that you can stick an LED on a signal and figure out what the state of it is, but you're loading it. You can stick a driver in an LED on a signal and find out what the state of it is, but you can only tell as fast as you can see. Logic probes will generally be able to detect transient events. For example, if something is turning on for one millisecond every second, you're not going to see that. The logic probe will. And it's just a little chunk of logic hooked up. Maybe it's typically $15 for a cheap one. Again, you can spend a lot more, but I got a cheap $15 logic probe that does pretty much everything I need. A microcontroller starter kit is what you're going to use to develop and test your code. And I've got an example of one here. Let me show you what the hardware looks like. Unfortunately, I did not take any pictures of this to get it set up on the slides, but it is a little bored. You've got a couple of serial reports going into it. You've got some LEDs and buttons. You've got some headers so you can plug it into the outside world if you want to. And then all you do is you download your code from your development environment, which brings me to the development environment. I say a PC probably running Windows, even knowing that that will get me stoned with this audience. There are lots of good development tools that will run under Linux. And there's more coming every day for all sorts of alternate operating systems. The good ones. The truth is though that the manufacturers are selling to the commercial market and the commercial market is still pushing the Windows development tools. So double boot your machine and bring up Windows every time you need to actually use their IDE and then throw it away when you're done. Other useful stuff you'll probably want to have around. A breadboard. You can spend 20 bucks and a breadboard is just a matrix of plug points that you can drop chips into and it gives you a way of wiring things together quickly. A power supply. The great thing about this particular development board and many of them is that they are really forgiving on what you can put into them as power. They've got a regulator on here so if you feed it anywhere from 6 to 15 volts, AC or DC of any polarity, it's happy. It fixes it for you. And a oscilloscope. I jokingly mentioned the four two gigahertz four-channel oscilloscope as something you want but don't need. An oscilloscope is a useful thing and you can get them fairly cheaply or you can build your own which brings me to the home-built logic analyzer. A logic analyzer just lets you look at multiple channels. The only reason that's particularly useful is if you've got multiple data signals and you want to see what they're doing relative to one another you need to be able to capture them all at the same time. There's a ton of debugging you can do by inferring by just knowing what has to be going on because that's the way you built it but occasionally things don't work the way you built them. If you want to... Sorry, hold on. As an aside, I am used to doing this talk to a group of about 15 people at a time and it's generally a much more interactive thing which is why I'm sort of going off in all directions at once and why I'm trying desperately to cling to my slides because they are my touchstone with reality. The data books data books you can get from manufacturers can be useful but for the most part they are out of date the day they roll off the press. The web is your friend and application engineers are your friends. They will provide you the information you need to know and I would encourage you to go ahead and call up the manufacturers in order to print copies of things like the instruction set because you need to know this stuff but for specifics about parts pull down the datasheet because you'll find out that datasheets often refer to the D and F version of this part after they fixed all the preliminary bugs. And then share and enjoy you will find a vast amount of interesting cool stuff about what people are doing online. So when you're trying to get your parts the first thing to keep in mind the manufacturer's job is to sell you parts. They can be very helpful but call your thing whatever you're building a product. They build products.   Project realistic volumes which is to say don't tell them you're going to be producing two and a half billion of your project but I'm going to be doing one to five thousand this year. That leaves open that of course the volumes will be ramping up. Engineering samples are a great thing. Generally if you can try not to talk to humans. My favorite example of this is the Maxim website allows you to get Maxim's generated circuits I believe up to eight or ten devices completely off a form on their website you never have to talk to a person. You will talk to a lot of representatives the manufacturers don't generally want to interact with the customers whether they're design engineers or just people calling for general information so they keep the lower of the representatives the manufacturers representatives between you and them they usually have pointers to these on their website maintain a world at X these guys only job is to know your name and to try to get you what you need you'll be producing two and a half billion units sometime in a few years and then finally know what you want I point this out it seemed obvious but I thought I'd mention it because as I said there's a jillion different variations of every part. If you call up and say hi I want an ATML AVR microcontroller you've just narrowed it down to about a hundred and forty parts if you say I want an ATML 80, 12, 80, 90, 1200 you've narrowed it down to a family of about ten but you have to specify everything so if you don't specify something they will often provide you parts which they pick at random from whatever they have on hand just be aware of how the part numbering scheme works and try to present complete information and then finally buy what you must there's a lot of good sources for small quantity parts Digi-Key and JDR Micro devices are two of my favorite so once you've got your parts together and you've put your lab together and you've got your development board and your building how are you actually going to wire breadboards are good as I mentioned earlier for wiring things up quickly for doing small projects breadboards as I said are a matrix of interconnect where you're just plugging boards on this white bed of holes they work for relatively slow things if you are trying to do anything at 10 gigahertz I'm sorry at even 10 megahertz you will find that you have signal integrity problems put a board and wire wrap is where you take a piece of burst board and you stick the sockets in it and you wire wrap them together it's surprisingly old and surprisingly good technology a wire wrap board will be good for up to 10 megahertz application typically and then finally I mentioned the joy and agony of surface mount devices as form factor has gotten smaller on virtually everything surface mount is often the only form factor a lot of parts are available in and the only way you can really use a surface mount device is to solder it down or at least solder wires onto it it's a real pain in the butt and I would encourage you to look into surface mount breakout boards they're just boards that have a surface mount set of pads that you can stick a part on to and then bring wires out from it's useful because it means that you can then run things at much higher speeds and finally if you're actually building a system that's only got a few parts you might want to consider doing your own printed circuit board that's sort of beyond the scope of this overview but there's a lot of good tools for doing simple board layout and you can actually fabricate them by hand debugging your hardware the single greatest problem is trying to figure out what part of your system is broken since you're working in both hardware and software try to develop software modules that allow you to test the hardware first and keep everything module of later early feature creep it's a standard obvious thing that everyone forgets but get it working then get it cool design for testability put some mechanisms in your hardware and in your firmware to allow you to probe different sections of the thing as I said keep it modular and then the hierarchy of failure this is what is most likely to break you you are uniformly you the engineer are uniformly the single largest cause of failure second the tools yes tools are sometimes broken sometimes the compiler doesn't produce real code sometimes the assembler is broken but it was probably you and finally sometimes the hardware is broken but it might have been the tools but it was probably you and then I tried to come up with a list of the basic rules of thumb that come out of more years of doing this than I can actually admit pay attention to current and drive capacity if you try to run a two horsepower motor off a logic level signal you will discover that it doesn't work buttons bounce when you press a button you as a human working in the millisecond time domain see a transition from off to on in the megahertz domain that your microcontroller may be sampling this thing it sees off on off on off off on off off on off on there are simple ways to fix this but just be aware that what you think is going on is not necessarily what's really going on when in doubt add a capacitor the truth is that higher speed parts draw more and more current every time you have a switching event you have a high current high current draw and that means that all of the leads coming from your power supply are getting drained down basically you have to provide localized power for all of your parts when in doubt stick a capacitor between power and ground which brings me to the next one sometimes polarity does matter if you stick a polarized capacitor between power and ground make sure you get it right because the smell of burning tantalum is really awful and if you're holding it when you plug it in live it will explode in your fingers and it's not very pleasant if it's hot turn it off there are exceptions to this if you're building a system where you know you've got to have a heat sink on your regulator then you can expect it to get warm if it is emitting light it is probably getting too hot try to understand the switching levels of the parts you're using it used to be that logic was inherently 0 volts is low 5 volts is high the switching threshold is 2 volts for anything above 2 volts is high anything below 0.8 is low this is TTL 5 volt those assumptions no longer hold because CMOS switching levels may or may not be used a lot of the CMOS parts use TTL switching levels but just be aware of it and then 5 volt versus 3.3 logic has been slowly migrating to 3.3 volts it's very possible to build an entire 3.3 volt system now it's very possible to build lower voltage systems all of this stuff works at 5 volts one of the nice things about a lot of the microcontrollers is they work at any voltage you feed them some of the pick parts for example will work at anything between I believe 7.5 and 2.5 something like this and the great thing about that is you don't even have to hook it up to a power regulator you just run the battery into it and the battery will drop off and maybe it will slow down it will eventually fail but you can get away with a wide voltage input pay attention to timing I'm not even going to justify that with an explanation and don't let inputs float if you have an input to a system floating just tag it to a power supply or at least pull up or pull down resistor on it if you've got a signal that's just sitting there floating along it resolves to a non it may resolve to a non-logical value or it may resolve to a case where some parts of the system think it's high, some parts of the system think it's low and you end up with a really nice high current path between your voltage source and ground and that ties back into if it gets hot turn it off and then a corollary to don't leave inputs floating that a friend of mine pointed out just as I was going over my slides this morning is make sure that you are actually applying power because CMOS devices can actually occasionally sort of work by powering themselves through their own inputs this is a particularly nasty bug to chase down because it's really bizarre behavior but basically make sure you actually apply power to the parts because it may still work and you won't know why if it acts flaky an example project that I wanted to frame this in was I saw a thing on Slashdot about a really cool little logging keyboard and I thought that is a great microcontroller project I believe they call it Ghostboard, something like this but it's very few IOs you've got a serial keyboard stream coming in and going out and then I wanted to be able to log whatever was going through there so you've got slow serial flash memory you can get some really large serial flash devices they're not terribly fast to program but the great thing is you can power this whole mess of just a few parts off the keyboard port you can sniff incoming keystrokes it can act as its own keyboard and it has some concept of time and the idea was that you would have this device that would be logging keystrokes as they come through inserting keystrokes if I wanted to and there's all sorts of great applications for this some of which are are even ethical and finally the inspirational message like any project the hard part of this is getting started hopefully this is giving you some really broad overview idea of how to get started the design space you get to play in is huge there's an infinite number of things you can build and a blinking LED is an amazingly satisfying thing to recap, microcontrollers different development opportunity, easy to get started and it's a lot of fun to both learn and tinker with this stuff and if you want to get an AVR development kit and this is why I was a little aghast at the size of the audience I have five of these things and so I'm going to use this as a chance to extract feedback from anyone who wants a chance to get one of these if you could write down a name or handle what I should change about this talk because I'm hoping to do more presentations like this and if anything if you liked anything about the talk, tell me that and tell me a project you'd like to do with your kit and then in about an hour five people can pick them up at the bellhop desk and they'll have your name or handle written on them I hope that some of you are inspired this, like I said is a complete AVR development kit it's got all of the software to it's got an integrated development environment that allows you to do assembly development and it includes one instance of the AT90S 1200 part which is 1K of code space 64 bytes of RAM a three deep stack and 15 IOs and it can self-clock itself at 1 MHz and then for Q&A question number zero, what is with the jacket? since I get a lot of questions about this I had to include this this is my artwork I made these up last year I'm actually selling them this year so I'm hawking them, they're 50 bucks this is how I pay for my trip in my amusement you would be amazed how much conversation these things have generated in the last year and if you want to contact me you can reach me at pking at pkscientific.com questions yes okay a lot of my projects lately have been trying to control GU between a PC with an arbitrary set of ports for example a serial port and external devices and so mostly really low speed stuff where I'm just parsing simple commands on a serial port and then based on that controlling an external device like a small robotic arm and junk like that what else have I done recently? there's an infinite amount of fun to be had with DTMF decoders and I won't elaborate on that and then of course most of my time most of my actual time lately has been sucked up with my job which is building a protocol control engine for an infrared wireless networking system which also uses an 8-bit microcontroller that's the other thing I wanted to point out I tend to emphasize the low end of the spectrum on these parts there's a lot of really cool 8-pin parts where you've got 6 IOs power and ground and you can do some cool stuff with that if you really want to you can get 64-bit and 8-bit micros you can get microcontrollers that have much more I.O. address data bus and also I've emphasized the low end of the microcontroller spectrum but you can get much higher performance processor cores there are 64-bit microprocessor cores embedded in control systems obviously they pay more but you can do more with them yes, I have seen them I cannot think of any specific yeah if you go to EDMag.com which is EDMagazine I believe it's EDM or EE times that does an annual microcontroller roundup where they present a summary of all of the parts pardon? Hitachi SH ok he suggested the Hitachi which also supports you said supports the beginner tool set yes sure I've managed to talk much faster than I usually do as I often do and I'm nervous in front of a large group so let's use the laptop for something useful again I apologize one of the things that this is the latest version of the AVR development studio it's a fairly nice integrated development environment and this is a remarkably trivial example but it shows you the whole design fly I created a 9 byte program which let me expand everything here basically this is just a little load some data in read in the set of buttons on the AVR microcontroller board and output it to the LEDs so I use buttons to turn on LEDs by way of a microprocessor yeah there's some unnecessary steps in there anyway do you have specific questions about the development environment or oh ok a whole good sub topic C development environments there are some good C cross compilers which will give you the ability to do fairly tight code I tend to not use them simply because I like to have really low level control over my code but I'm also fairly paranoid about that the truth is if you set up the tools correctly you can do it without shooting yourself in the foot the problem is that the C compilers primary reason in life is to optimize the code in ways that you don't necessarily understand otherwise you'd be doing it by hand and to hide things in the background so it's really easy to end up with code being fluffed up or shuffled around in such a way that you end up with a much larger image than you were intending that said there are a lot of good C development environments and in fact I believe there are a lot of the GNU modules for various microcontrollers so yeah yeah GCC is there a GCC for the annual rate? okay great, I apologize so yeah if you look around you will find some of these tools a lot of the third party C development tools are also available in various demo farms for free one of the nice things about the AVR development kit is also includes a simulator I haven't set up the simulation environment to demonstrate this but it lets you do step by step simulation of your code the caveat about that is you're of course working in a simulated environment where you don't have the benefit of your external hardware so you have to assume that you now know what the stuff you've glommed on to the microcontroller is doing yes yes a good place to, the question was what's a good place to find out information about the formats of the various binary files to strip out the headers and other information so you get just the code you need for your microcontroller unfortunately I have to say I don't know it's fairly context dependent I mean the specific file formats you mentioned Elf are I am assuming well documented but I do not know specifically where you would get the how to reduce it for a microcontroller version yes in small quantities I believe the specific part I'm using here which is a 20 pin dip is about two and a half bucks so good for small projects yes am I using the AVR commercially and if so am I able to get any of them right now this is another good question ironically you can get engineering samples you can't actually buy most of them right now this leads into an aside about the electronics industry that's fairly hideous but you would think are uniformly available and infinitely cheap are actually on allocation allocation is the process by which they tell you sure we can get you that part in 58 weeks right now I have a project that is in development that may use an AVR although I'm early enough that I'm seriously concerned about the fact that the lead times are huge any other questions oh sorry yes first question in the process we know it actually comes with the starter kit one of the nice things about this particular starter kit is you've got a serial port and the development environment will generate a binary file or several different formats of binary file and then a programmer there's program code in the development environment that allows you to just directly dump it into here in this case it's a flash microcontroller so once it's programmed it's non-volatile and you can cycle the contents about a thousand times before you start to stress the flash sales oh buying microcontrollers from Motorola over the web I'm not familiar with that I have used some of the Motorola family in the past they're very good parts a lot of them are derived from architectures that you are probably already familiar with the 6800 series and so on am I that nervous thank you no there's no reason to avoid them I'm actually quite fond of the 68HC11 family which is a great 8-bit part and there's no reason not to buy them over the web one of the this starts to get into the datasheet details but there are a lot of good features the 68HC11 series in particular has a lot of different onboard peripherals available right now and so if you're looking for a rich feature set that is a good way to go yes he asks what are good books on interfacing to external peripherals stepper motors IR systems and so on I used to have a few books that I recommended although as you pointed out the things get out of date really quickly because especially state of the art in high performance high current switching transistors for example has come a long ways last few years where you used to have to go through gyrations and perhaps actually have several stages of drivers to drive even small motors you can now do it with monolithic devices what I actually encourage people to do is just surf data sheets generally find application notes that describe what you're trying to do and find data sheets to make sure that the specifications fit yes what's a good way to surf for this information I unfortunately I don't have a good sort of unified solution I'm a web minimalist I just go to google and give it a few search terms and see what pops up surprisingly often you will hit manufacturers pages or if you include a search term of application note that filters out a lot of crap any other questions yes are the microcontrollers provided with sensors do manufacturers tend to write a unified assembler that works for all of the microcontrollers in their family the question is are the microcontrollers provided are the assemblers provided with the microcontroller yes generally the assemblers are divided by family because what will happen is within a particular microcontroller family the instructions at architecture will be approximately the same there will be some instructions that aren't supported because for example that addressing mode doesn't exist in the hardware but for the most part the manufacturer will generally have a baseline assembler that they provide for example in this system you have to specify which of the AVR family you're using so that it knows if you're trying to set up the stack pointer and it doesn't have a stack pointer it will tell you you shouldn't be doing that the the cross compiler tools or cross assembler and cross compiler tools such as the GNU tools are available for a vast number of parts and those are maintained independently some of the manufacturers are actually going over to things like the GNU tool set as their baseline tool set for the most part everyone still has some third party or in-house developed assembler they like any other questions yes how to pick out an oscilloscope on ebay how to pick out an oscilloscope on ebay how to pick out an oscilloscope on ebay it depends on it depends on exactly what you're trying to do with it that the most useful thing in oscilloscope lets you see is signal versus time the second most useful thing if you have a two channel scope is seeing two signals versus each other if you're trying to pick out a good cheap used oscilloscope and you're doing microcontroller systems a bandwidth of a few tens of megahertz is going to give you anything you would want to see in terms of intentional signals I say intentional signals because the caveat is if you've got noise in a system that's for example glitching during a switch you may have very short duration spikes and you would want more bandwidth on your oscilloscope to find that are there kits that you can use to use your computer as your oscilloscope absolutely a lot of the high end oscilloscopes now are basically just a windows box stuck onto a chunk of hardware that's the oscilloscope you can go the other direction and get a sampling card that you stick into your PC at the very low end you can actually make an oscilloscope out of a good sound card you can just feed that as an audio input and sample it it will show you the waveform but again you're fairly bandwidth limited there yes could you repeat the name I know what you're talking about and I can't think of the name Fred Martin the handy board is that the 60 at HC-11 based one that is a great development board because that provides the microcontroller it's very similar to this sort of thing and it provides a breakout of the signals and a way to hook things up and I believe in circuit programming although I'm not sure you would have to search unfortunately I don't have a pointer to that ok, Fred Martin handy board web search any other questions ok, I'm going to call it quits then I will be around for a few more minutes over here if you want to drop by your commentary and tell me if you want an AVR development kit and thank you very much for listening


So, thank you very much for everyone being here at this early hour for this Congress. I had a good chance passing my checkpoint for security this morning, so I had no problem in entering the C3 world today. And this is all about identity, identity to pass somewhere, to get somewhere inside in the right direction or to authenticate yourself towards someone else. This project HeartMood will tell us a bit about how we can solve this in the digital world, because wearing something around your wristband in the digital world might not work as well. And so, I want to hand over to HeartMood, who worked on self-sovereign identity here in the region of Hamburg. Welcome to SSI in Hamburg, and thanks for having me at the ModCast experience. My name is HeartMood from GENSTEP, and with my colleague Attila, we will today look at self-sovereign identity, first from a more user-focused perspective, and then diving deep into one core aspect of what actually needs to be done to build your own SSI system. So, before I talk about the consequences of putting SSI as a service into use, let me first start with some very high-level basics. What is SSI? It's not so much a working technology as of now, although there of course are some first implementations. It's more a set of standards. I'm saying this only for now, the end of 2020, as we see a lot of push from the EU and the German government to implement the European solution for an identity mechanism, and SSI checks all the boxes. So, SSI is actually two standards, and both could be used independently. Firstly, there is the decentralized identifier, but did. And secondly, the standard for verifiable credentials or VCs. Taken together, they provide a secure and privacy-focused decentralized identity and authorization mechanism. The did is an address, much like a URI. It is created using a did method, subject of the second talk. The address can be resolved, and a document retrieved that can serve as a storage for almost everything related to my identity. Storage can be in the document, which is really just a JSON file, or referenced in the document and stored externally. The document is technically managed by a did controller, and all of this is nicely documented in the spec. So allow me here to simplify and to say that it is not completely wrong to think of the did and its connected data stores as your wallet for ID and authorization. VCs now are an important part of what is in this wallet. A VC is a verifiable credential, a documented proof from a verifiable source signed with public key cryptography that contains validation of some sort. It could be from the state validating your personal data, or from your bank validating your account details. It could be your driver's license or the membership in your favorite music club. The important thing to remember about VCs is that they can be used like a membership card. You don't need the approval of the authorization source to show your VC as a proof to a third party. Also, you can do need things with showing only partial information or zero knowledge proofs. But what is SSI for the user? Let's distinguish between two different scenarios. One that you'll likely find when you search for SSI on the internet using SSI to identify a person. The did in this case is simply me or rather my wallet or running a hill twice within a certain time. The verifiable credentials can be described as follows. First, there are the badges I earned, proof that I did certain things, that I passed certain conditions, such as getting a degree, but also attending a conference or running up a hill twice within a certain time limit. Then there are the keys I collected, keys that unlock information I can access or share. For example, with digital services, keys to the data collected with my fitness band, keys to unlock my vehicle with my mobile. Finally, there are the powers I was officially granted, which is really just a different wording for the same thing. Permission to park in certain spots, ownership of a vehicle, permission to ride a bus or visit a concert. Another less known application of SSI is managing the ID of things. Here, the did can be linked to an ID token such as a windshield sticker, identifying my car or a portable access token that I can pass around freely. A VC here contains the data required for interactions. A car can provide its make and type of engine or state of battery and the permission from its user to pay for recharging. You can see where I'm going. Much as you don't need your bank to show proof of your financial data, the object does no longer need its owner to show proof of the powers it was granted. And finally, VCs can also be used to store the information about the history of interactions, much like badges only for objects. So what does this mean for a real application? Put simply, it's very powerful. We have explored some of the applications of SSI in a BMW research project nicknamed Stereo. There's a link in the comments and I will present some of the results here. If you, for example, take mobility and more specifically shared mobility, public transportation and ride services, so everything you use to get around but do not own, there are two different specific ways to use those as a tourist. Or if you happen to not see the next train vehicle on the street, you need to first understand what options you have. This is discover. Afterwards, it's straightforward. You book, you use. And very often the case is more simple. You already have a plan where you're going, you book a vehicle, you use it. Perhaps you don't know what you'll do later in the day, but that will follow the same mechanism. You book something, you use something. And in essence, this means that intermodal mobility seamlessly using different modes of transportation and different providers to get around in an urban environment sounds pretty complex, but is pretty much covered by Google Maps and SSI. SSI being used for getting permission and proving permission. Yes, Ubers and others are building mighty tools for collecting your data while providing mobility, but that's really not necessary. You are only required to share your information with the service providers you use and only the information that is required for the service with SSI. No need to share your location while you're walking from the Uber to the bar. So if you follow the discussion in Hamburg, mobility is also changing. And in Hamburg, the Beherde for Verkehr and Mobilities vendor, which roughly translates to agency for transportation and mobility turnaround is planning to change things. Cars will not go away tomorrow, but the idea is to improve utilization and fine control where they can go. And when? An important piece of the puzzle is the Landesbetrieb Verkehr, who are not only tasked with shutting out cars from Jungfansstiegen-Mänkebergstrasse, two of the main roads in the city center, but also with managing car traffic in general in Hamburg. Backstrasse, two of the main roads in the city center, but also with managing car traffic in general in Hamburg. If you want digital ID for cars, if you want digital IDs for cars, you need a digital registration. With the Christoph Kochgegruppe, we have defined digital registration for cars that will free you from having paper documentation such as the 2000s Bestätigung 1 and 2. Using your digital ID and the digital proof of where you live, the LBV then can give you a car, the digital permission to park in residential zones, digital permission to park in residential zones. If you invite a friend post corona, you can transfer your trip. If you invite a friend post corona, you can transfer your temporary permission to them so they can park in your residential zone to visit. If you need a plumber, they can provide digital proof of your order to be allowed to park in your street and so on. SSI can be used to store these proofs in a decentralized way with or in the car. This control does not need to access a central ID service and this in turn, thus access control does not require a central ID service and this in turn minimizes the need for sharing your personal data. The use case can be expanded to cover other services, control for deliveries to your infancy, access to private parking facilities or all the charging infrastructure that will be built in the city. Perhaps you can see how this has the potential to change the way we interact with services and the keyword here is decentralization. SSI can decouple timing of granting and checking rights. This in turn enables edge communication as a network of things can decide whether a car is parked properly or a ticket for the bus is valid without interaction with the central system. It returns the ownership of data back to the individual and it simplifies the integration of systems so data no longer needs to be sent from one system to another but it is rather the user who decides to share her data with those services she wants to use and trust. So why are we not there yet? As we see it, the problem is not that this is not feasible. The problem is that the most important gains are for the users and while there are no users of the system, no services will jump on the SSI bandwagon and without services the advantages for users remain hypothetical. We feel there is a good chance that SSI will move forward. As said in the beginning, there's a strong ask from the EU and German government for ID solutions. What we would like to discuss with you is if you have any ideas to give privacy a further push and how to faster make SSI a real solution, not just a very good idea. Thank you for listening so far. I hope you enjoyed the presentation and I'm really looking forward for your comments and questions. Welcome back from this video from Hartmut all about how to authenticate yourself, how to have your own digital identity at the moment. There are no questions asked yet, so we welcome you to come into HackInt and ask your questions. All you want to know about this project, there's our Signal Angel 95p waiting for your questions. You also have maybe the chance to use Twitter and all other feedback options. Anytime in between, Hartmut, you did this project here in Hamburg. What was the advantage of doing it in this wonderful city here? Well, I think the reason for doing it in Hamburg was that for one the project was about finding real-world applications and it's really hard to do that on a global or even EU-wide scale, so we went really local. The other aspect is that in Hamburg we have a lot of projects at the moment that are ongoing that are centered around mobility and we felt mobility is a really good starting point for identities, digital identities because yes, they are, I would say, not as necessarily secure as if you were going into banking, but they are very frequent use cases and if you want to get digital identity working, you need to use it and if you can use it in transportation, that definitely gives it a boost. So that was the thinking that we can do it in Hamburg. We could do it together with the city and this is also something that we found actually to be true. So we were working very closely with the LBV and with the HAFAV and with the HASPA to identify how we could basically reach people and offer very simple services to them. Okay, I have one question here incoming. I don't really see how this is different from what David Schoen did in the 90s. Actually, I don't know what David Schoen did in the 90s, so maybe whoever asked the question can amend that. What I would say new here is that the standards are developing into something that can be put into real use. So SSI for now is just standard by the World Wide Web Consortium, but there are several groups. We were only one of four projects that were using it as a technical standard. You have something that is not like OpenID, for example, a federated ID, but a really decentralized ID and a decentralized ID that is being pushed by the German government. And I think this is a new situation. It doesn't mean that all the technology is really new. Definitely a big part of SSI is public key cryptography and that is not really something new, but actually use it in this way is something that we found hasn't happened so far. Great. So there's another question going out for the security of the system. What is stopping the service provider to store my data provided by VC and abuse them? Is there also, this is also within the SSI outside of my personal control? Yes, once you, there is a fundamental difference if you start using SSI. First, you have control over your data and you have control with whom to share it with. This is, I think, an important difference. And then once you shared it, it depends on the terms of service. So the mobility provider, if we take that example, does not need your information. So there is no real use for them to actually store it. Sorry, there is no real must for them to store it. And if we, this is something that highly depends on regulation, if we were to introduce a regulation similar to GDPR that would make it actually costly to store that information, service provider would be motivated to not do this at the moment. The benefits of storing your data vastly outweigh the problems that people have with it and GDPR is starting to change that. So for simple use cases, I think SSI already does that. You don't need users credentials. You just need a third party for authentication. And this is where we see really big commercial services like Auth0 already working quite well. So people don't store their data themselves. They use a service to do that and could be the same for other types of data. All right. About making people feel secure with SSI, how do you do that? For example, do you know the term of Irma? I reveal my attributes or something like that. There is two problems that are here. I think one is feeling really safe and the other is conveniently still using your service. So what we saw also when we talked to citizens of Hamburg is that once you start thinking about it, there is really a strong willingness to protect your data. I think one good example for that is the German COVID app, which is comparatively safe, but a lot of discussion centers around how it shares data. And then the moment after they've discussed this, people just go on the Internet order a pizza and share their data with providers that take everything and give almost nothing. So I think in our concept, what we had to define is where is the sweet spot between really doing something very conveniently and doing something really safely. And this also if you go further into it starts with where do you store your data? Because if you're really, really, really concerned about it and SSI allows you to do that, you should basically run your own service provider, or you should have a hardware store to store your data. If you look at the citizens of Hamburg, you won't find that many who will do that. So there will be a need for some trusted providers. And this is why we work with Sparkas or Hamburg DE, who are not that interested in taking your data to actually monetize that. And you can, to a certain degree, trust them to actually take care of the data. I think this is the more severe topic then. And then the other bit is where do you show what data you share? And we haven't gotten to the stage where we can really define that from your eye perspective. But the thinking that we had in the project is that there is a relatively good model with how apps are being installed on mobile phones that many people know. So like other projects, we actually went down the same path and said, whenever you have a request for your data, it will show up much in the same way as someone asking permission to read certain bits of data. And if you want to expand on that, you definitely need the convenience factor for repeated questions. So if you do a transaction with your bank and they ask for certain details and you do that again and again, you might want to have something that is recognizable that says, okay, this is actually your bank asking and it's nothing out of the ordinary. And then if something comes that is very different from the usual request, that is something that we would show in more detail. Could you elaborate on how decentralization works on this? Yes, in many ways. So the most important, I think, is the very hyper credential. So most access control mechanisms in the digital world require to go to a trusted source and ask them for the information. So for example, if I wanted to look in, let's take your badge basically, if I wanted to know if your badge is real, I would go to the one who issued the badge and ask them. And with SSI, this is no longer necessary because the badge is signed and the signature can be verified. So I don't need the issuer of the badge to be present. I can just look at the badge and I can decide whether it is valid or not. And if it's valid, I can decide to trust it. I can add further mechanisms to see if it's still valid, like if it has an expiry date or if you take the driver's license, if someone did things that made the authorities take the driver's license away. But the existence of the driver's license doesn't need, you don't need the issuing authority to prove that the document is enough. And this means I can carry it. And that is a very important part of the decentralization. I can just have it with me. And this means, for example, if you go to the object IDs, a self-driving car can have all the required information to interact with services and there's no need for the internet. It can all be done on the edge. So the local communication is something that this enables. Great. We got another information on the David Schaum in the 90s. Schaum did road pricing, ticketing access based on zero knowledge proofs and decentralization for the Dutch government. It sounds pretty similar. I will definitely look into that. And we also didn't do everything ourselves in this project. So what we did is the SSI identification bit. There's already a project in the Hafa Faw, for example, at the moment, which is aiming to calculate the best price based on your actions. So when you take a bus and then an S-Bahn and then you go back and then in the end buy you a day ticket and not for individual tickets. But in order to do these services, the current solution very heavily relies on geo data. And that is something that is being stored and collected and actually not thrown away. And it would stay with the Hafa Faw for a long time. So what we did is we took the current plan and changed it in a way that would be more data friendly, I would say. It's for the last question now. Do you see the need for official regulations in order for this technology to become a good part for our society? Yes, I think that if there are no regulations, the chance that something like this will see it is relatively low. But it doesn't mean that everything has to be regulated. I think the important part is that people start using a system. And once it is in place and there is a certain user base, it will be commercially viable to incorporate that. And then the system can actually dictate how it's being used. But for the starter, I think this can be something like communal services. So if all cities in all of Germany would decide that their services are only being accessible using a secure identity system, that would definitely mean that everyone has a digital identity system that they can use. And that would be a really good start. What a wonderful word for the end. Thank you, Hartmut, very much.


Johnny Holland. Jerry Holland, Johnny. Tri-mutual insurance limited. Oh, sure, Jerry. How are you? The name Curtis Randall mean anything to you. Uh, the banker here in Hartford? That's the one. He's also one of our big policyholders. At least he was. Oh, what's happened to him? A day before yesterday, the inner friend of his fellow named Byron Peter York. And? And I had some old character in the neighborhood to act as guide. Randall and Peters didn't know it, but the old goat was an alcoholic. So what happened? At the end of the day's hunt, they raised Cain with Curly because he hadn't found them a deer. Curly the name of the guide, huh? Yeah, a thousand. A hundred. Wow. Who's Randall's beneficiary? His hunting companion, Peters. Peters? No wonder you want me to investigate. Johnny. Only this one looks too easy. Wait, Johnny. I'll be right over. Exciting adventures of a man with the action-packed expense account. America's fabulous freelance insurance investigator. Yours truly, Johnny Dollar. And now act one of yours truly, Johnny Dollar. A special investigator, Johnny Dollar. To the tri-mutual insurance company limited Hartford, Connecticut. Following is an account of expenses incurred during my investigation of the hapless hunter matter. Expense account item one, 95 cents for a taxi across town to tri-mutual in the office of Jerry Holland. As they open the door, he might be halfway. Hey, what was the idea of hanging up on me, Johnny? Then when I tried to call you back, you'd left. Well, sure. I figured if this thing only happened a day or so ago, the faster I could get working on it, the better. Well, I'll go along with you, Matt. Where's this man, Peters? In the hospital. Because if anybody should be suspect, he's short. After all, as a beneficiary, what did you say? I tried to tell you on the phone only you hung up. Byron Peters is in the hospital. Where? Over in Kingman, New York. Why? Because he was shot up, too, with that drunken guide when he tried to prevent him from killing Randall. Oh. Then Curly killed himself. Yeah.  If it really is a case. Sorry, I guess I jumped to a conclusion before it. You sure did. Oh, half a million is still a lot of money. Sure it is. If you need it. And Byron Peters doesn't? Well, according to the local police chief who called me, it was in Byron Peters' brand new El Dorado that they drove over to Kingman. It was Peters who arranged for the guide's service. It was he who supplied the guns in the quick. OK, OK, Jerry. I'll take your word for it. What hospital is he in over there? Angel of Mercy. It's the only one. Any other information I ought to have? None that I can give you. As I told you, this is just routine because of the money involved, company policy. Of course, for your report, you might try to find out if this old Curly Summers the guide had any reason to have it in for Randall. Randall knew him before, huh? I thought you said Peters arranged for the guide. Well, I guess I did. But now, Jerry. Let me have Peters' home address with you, and Randall's. Sure, why not? And I hope you don't think. Did you know Randall well? Yes. Was he a drinking man? One martini before Denny, that's all. Hey, uh, why? How about Peters? Oh, I don't know. What difference would it make? Oh, just wondered. Don't kid me, Johnny. You've got something of your sleeve. Why, Jerry? Come on now, what is it? You know something about these people that I don't? Not a thing, so help me. But $500,000 is a lot of money.  Did I say I still suspect? But the way you've been talking. Did I? Well, no. Well, I do. Sure, with so little to go on, I had no reason at all to suspect Peters. Except for a hunch. But hunches have paid off for me more than once. Expense account item 2380, a tank full of gas for the drive across Route 6 to the New York state line. There, I picked up 9W, then 212 to Kingman. I found the Angel of Mercy Hospital on the way into town. The chief resident physician and Dr. Matthews was completely cooperative. And of no help whatsoever. Quite pointless to see him at the moment, Mr. Donald.  Mr. Peters is sleeping under sedation. Oh, I'm afraid the ordeal with the police left him quite exhausted. The police have already seen and questioned him? Yes, and they had no business questioning him so long in view of his condition. Shock, you know. Tell me something. Do they suspect that he killed Mr. Randall too, then wounded himself for an alibi? You mean that you do? Yeah. Do they? No, my boy. You must be joking, of course not. Oh, why not? Whether you realize it or not. And you will, if I permit you to see him, Mr. Peters, see the matter in which he was wounded, see the extent of his wound. I realize what? I asked you a question, Doctor. You will realize how impossible it would have been for him to shoot himself in that fashion, how narrowly he himself escaped death at the hands of that rumb-crazed guy. You're sure, Doctor? Of course I'm sure, and so are the police. Well, where does that leave me? If I may say so, who has egg on your face? Act two of yours truly, Johnny Dollar, in a moment. And now, act two of yours truly, Johnny Dollar, and the hapless hunter matter. A hunting guide had run him up in the little town of Kingman, New York. And according to report, was responsible for the death by shooting of wealthy banker Curtis Randall for the wounding of Randall's companion, Byron Peters. But Peters has been a fishery of Randall's half million dollar insurance policy. So naturally, the old bugger suspicion began to gnaw away at the back of my brain. Until that is, I saw Peters, his wounds, the x-rays, and finally talked with Captain McManus at the local police headquarters. Oh, sure, we talked to Peters, Mr. Dollar, but only to find out exactly what happened when he clearly went off his rocker and started spraying lead with his hunting rifle, then shot himself. Then my suspicion that Peters might have done the shooting Well, didn't you see how Mr. Peters was hit by that 30-30? Oh, look, he saw Curley pull the rifle on Mr. Randall and shoot him down. Yeah. Yeah, so he lunged at Curley. Like this. Curley whirled around, pulled the trigger. Yeah. Well, the x-rays I saw. Sure, well, then you know. When Peters lunged at him, the bullet creased his head from the top, went right through the muscles in the back of his left shoulder, and landed in the floor. So it's pretty obvious that Peters couldn't have shot himself. It's impossible. He would have had to have arms five or six feet long to shoot himself on the top of the head at that angle. Hey, when did you first learn about this whole thing, Captain? When Mr. Peters came to, he phoned me from up at Curley's cabin where it happened. I went up there right away. And Curley and Randall were dead. Peters was still lying next to the fireplace where he'd fallen. But if he was able to phone you, he pulled the phone over to him by the cord. Still had a good right hand, you know. Oh, I see. Where were Randall and Curley?  Curley lay between them. Just how much do you know about this Curley character? Well, that's the part I don't understand. Why did it? I heard he was an alcoholic. Sure, he was a town drunk in a harmless sort of a way, except when he'd go off on a rampage and get into a fight or two. But never during hunting season. Well, what did he do? Odd jobs of any kind, most anything. People had always refused to pay him until the job was done to make sure it stays over, huh? Well, at least reasonably sober. And just as soon as he got paid, he'd buy a lot of cheap whiskey and hole up in his cabin. That's where the murder occurred. Yeah, except during hunting season. Then he'd never touch it. He was a good guide, Mr. Dollar. He made a lot of money from the people who came up from New York City and Hartford and such. That's the part I don't understand. He was hitting the bottle during the season. Well, did he ever have any trouble with his clients before? Oh, he'd belly ache about them being so rich when he was so poor, that sort of thing. But he'd have to get awfully drunk. I swear, I don't understand it. Well, look, Captain, I'd like to see the bodies of Mr. Randall and Curly. Are they still hereabouts? Still, well, we're at the car in his office, then let's go, huh? I wasn't quite sure what I was looking for. Maybe that's the reason I found it. At least found something that started that old suspicion bug gnawing away again. Peter's back at the hospital and had a bad powder burn on his forehead next to where the bullet increased him. OK, he had said that Curly the guide pulled the trigger when he lunged at him. Randall, there at the coroner's office, had no powder burns. OK, it was apparent that he had been shot from across the room. But Curly, who was supposed to have shot himself upward through the jaw, also showed no sign of powder burn. Sure, the bullet hole indicated he could have shot himself by holding the gun at arm's length, a 30-30s fairly short, but no powder burn. I said nothing of this to Chief McMannus. Well, it pretty much bears out what Peter's told me and I told you, doesn't it? Curly shot Randall, then Peter's ran himself. Suppose, just for the sake of argument, that Randall did the shooting. First, that is. Well, now, Mr. Dollar, say, way, speaking of argument, Peter said that Randall and Curly had a pretty big one. You know, because Curly didn't find him any dare. That's when he started to get drunk and abusive. But as for Mr. Randall. On the other hand, suppose that Peter started the whole thing. Oh, now, look, you know that doesn't make any sense. Then try to kill himself. Well, isn't that what you're saying Curly did? Sure, but that's different. No good old bum realized he'd gone too far. There was no other way out for him. But a man like Peter's with money, everything he wants. Where is this cabinet, Curly's? Well, quite a way. 10, 12 miles. How do I get there? Straight down Parris Street to the mobile gas station. You know where that is? Yeah, I saw them away. OK, you turn left there. Go six miles and take the first right hand road right up the side of Deere Mountain until you get there. OK. Oh, here. Here's the key to it. Oh, good thanks, Chief. I'll see you later. You want me to go along with you? No. According to you, this hunch of mine is all wrong. I'm sure of it. OK, then. I'd better wing it alone. From the outside, Curly's cabin was a shack, nothing more. And there were enough cheap whiskey bottles scattered around the yard to sink a battleship. Inside, however, it was pretty comfortably fixed up. And back into the kitchen sink, I found a case of Prince Francis scotch, nearly full. Had Curly suddenly changed his taste for the better? Or had somebody decided to bait him with it? By the dark stains on the floor, I could see where both Randall and Curly had fallen. Where Peters had gone down, there was also the rifle slug embedded in the floor. And I noticed the angle at which that slug had ended, as though it had been fired from the ceiling, certainly from higher than any normal man could reach. And Curly was only five foot two or three. Then I saw something else, a heavy cord hanging down from one of the rafters above where Peters had lain. It was sprayed at the end as though forcibly broken. Now, suppose someone had hung a loaded rifle there by the trigger so the slightest pull would set it off. It stood under it, holding the muzzle carefully next to his head, to one side, just close enough to. Captain? Yeah, listen, still don't see how you can be. What do you mean? I'm going to use it to hospital here on this party line. I thought you had him under sedation? It would. Well, what happened? Well, he woke up and asked me who it was. I'd been here to see him while he was drowsy. Did you tell him who I was? Yes, and he seemed to drop off again, so I left him on. Doctor? Listen, darling. Yeah, chief. I don't know what it means any more than you to have that isolated cabin. Sure, chief, I'll leave right away. Byron Peters. That's right. Byron Peters. Act three of yours truly, Johnny Dollar, in a moment. And now act three of yours truly, Johnny Dollar, and the hapless hunter matter. He heard by that bullet as you pretended. That's right, darling. Does that help bear out your assertions about me? Not nearly so much as you're coming up here to this cabin, Peters. What's that supposed to mean? You rigged the whole thing pretty well, but not well enough. Why you wanted to get rid of Curtis Randall? I don't know. You're out of your mind. Randall was a friend of mine. You must have had some reason for killing him. Curly Summers murdered Kurt. We had a big argument because he hadn't found us any game. The only reason it got out of hand was because Curly was drunk. On what? On some of that expensive scotch I found in the kitchen. How should I know? Yes. Where did he get that? How should I know? Well, I do. You brought it here to help bolster your phony alibi. To indicate that Curly had it up here, had been hitting it. But you pulled a boo-boo. Why don't you talk sense, detective? Are you trying to tell me, Curly, would ever have stuff like that? Look, look at the old bottle scattered around outside. Cheap rotgut, that's all. What's more, he never touched a drop during hunting season. That's about as thin evidence as you could possibly dig up dollar and you know it. Peters, why did you come up here just now? OK, I'll tell you that, too. Lying there in the hospital, nursing your sore shoulder, you didn't plan on that injury, did you? I told the police. Oh, yeah, sure you told the police. Lying there, you suddenly remember the one thing that could show how you cleverly wounded yourself after you killed Landl and Curly. That piece of cord up on the rafter, where you hung Curly's gun up by the trigger. Dollar. You aimed it carefully along the side of your head, then yanked on it to set it off. Dangerous, but a great alibi. I told the police, the doctor. Curly pulled that trigger when I lunged at him, struggled with him. Little Curly held that gun high enough so the bullet would crease your head from above. I was bent over, lunging at him. And then entered the floor from up here, where this cord is hanging. You're pretty smart, aren't you, Dollar? Curly was supposed to have committed suicide, huh? Yes, he must have, because I heard him shoot himself as I passed out. Oh, sure. The bullet ended his lower jaw when up into his brain. That's right. That meant he had to hold that 30-30 at arm's length. So the muzzle right next to his jaw. That's right. Where it would have left powder burns. But, Peter, there were none. Because you shot him from across the room, the same as you did Randall. Yes. Yes, the same as I'll shoot you. If you can. My right hand is still good, Dollar. And so is the 38. You and your fool insurance company should have left things as they were. Chin up, Dollar. Tell me one thing. Sorry, I haven't got time. When I left the hospital, I made sure I was seen heading for New York. And I carefully set up alibis.  I had until you came along. And I will when I killed you. So if you have nothing more to say. One thing. Why did you kill Randall? You're trying to stall me. Why? All right. Because I forced him to name me and his insurance. I was the only one who knew about some shady operations in his early business career. The old story. That's right. Blackmail. That's why he's been paying me off, supporting me. Until recently? So you're threatening to expose him. No. What would that get me financially? Then tell me that. No. I've got to get out of here to New York. Just one thing more. I don't know why you're trying to stall me, but it's no use. So if you have any prayers, darling. Sure. Sure.  Oh, no. Not that old chef's nut. Why not? What?  Oh, no.  Dollar. I thought I told you on the phone to get out of here. Expensive out total, including gas to get me back to Hartford. $13.13. Remarks? Why? Why don't they ever learn? Yo, it's truly Johnny Dollar.