#tessel project

(@selkeymoonbeam)

A somewhat tired Kelsey backpacking in Iceland

How did you get involved with the Tessel Project?

I wasn't involved much in microcontrollers, or even programming, before Tessel. I'd worked with both a bit in college, but it wasn't a guiding passion for me.

The summer after I graduated, I was living with several friends, including the team of three that was founding Technical Machine to build Tessel.

I had a work-from-home contracting job at the time. Our apartment had no air conditioning, and Boston was really, really hot that summer. So I started showing up at Technical Machine's office space, and grew interested in the proposition: how do you get people who have no idea what they are doing to try hardware – and not fail? How do you take the world of the Internet – obviously useful, but traditionally accessed via screens (pretty limiting and draining, in my opinion) – and better hook it up to the real world and to physical space?

Within about a month of the company's founding, I was showing up to work every day, writing about the project, getting more into programming, and getting involved.

I can't claim credit for the idea of JavaScript on a microcontroller, or the implementation (novel at the time) of Wifi on a microcontroller. But I am really proud of the influence I was able to have over the user experience. As a relative beginner in both JavaScript and hardware, I was always asking: how do we make this or that clear to people? How will this feature be understood by someone who has never picked up a wire before?

As the project developed, I adopted an "I fight for the user" mindset and guided product development as Director of Community.

How to run an open source hardware project. Impressed. They ship atoms. #OSCON @tesselproject @SelkeyMoonbeam pic.twitter.com/oerr8RNDZH

— Ian Tien (@iantien) May 18, 2016

Kelsey Breseman speaking at OSCON 2016: "How to build a product when nobody's getting paid"

When we transitioned to open governance as the Tessel Project, I put together a lot of our new structure and rules and became one of the four founding Steering Committee members. Together, we (now five of us) run the project.

What do you like best about being involved with Tessel?

It has been exciting to watch this project and community grow.

I travel around the world giving workshops on Tessel, and I love that moment, every time, when a person's face lights up.

"Oh my gosh!" they say. "It did something! I made it do something!"

Most of the people I teach Tessel to are people who have never had a success with hardware before. Sometimes, I'm also teaching them to code– that's a lot of fun.

📽 @selkeymoonbeam live coding on @tesselproject at @nodeconfoslo -https://t.co/2OamQ3vKli pic.twitter.com/922qvKfKkd

— Opbeat (@opbeat) July 9, 2016

Kelsey Breseman live coding on Tessel 2 at NodeConf Oslo 2016

The other piece that I love is building connections between people– inspiring them to work on things together.

Community is powerful. If I were to take on the whole of the Tessel project by myself, it would die pretty quickly. But if I can inspire a few people to work with me on it, we can get a lot done.

One of the biggest challenges is figuring out how to keep a distributed team inspired and engaged. Our team members mostly haven't met each other!

It's an ongoing social experiment for me to create tools and practices that make people want to keep coming back.

Discussing @tesselproject with @SelkeyMoonbeam back at #ruhrjs 🦄 (+@rameramwe lounging in the bg 😅) #mozTechSpeakers pic.twitter.com/VauNlP9QI7

— Flaki (@slsoftworks) August 3, 2016

Kelsey Breseman and Flaki (István Szmozsánszky) discussing Tessel at RuhrJS

I absolutely love when I go off in the woods for a few days, come back to the internet, and discover that someone I've never met or heard of has started working on one of our repos. Or, when community members ask support questions, and other community members respond without anyone from the official Team being involved. That feels like community success.

Outside of Tessel, what are you working on right now?

I've been thinking a lot about climate change recently: reading books and articles on the subject, trying to wrap my head around all the issues at play and the opportunities they create. I'm blogging about my thoughts and taking copious notes, both as a way to help me think.

The plan is to start a company in this space, though I'm not sure yet of the exact proposition. Climate change is going to require a lot of people to work hard on interesting new problems. I would like to be involved in connecting smart people to interesting, meaningful problems.

Do you have any advice for people who want to get involved with the Tessel Project?

Jump in with both feet. We'll catch you.

People are sometimes nervous to start contributing to the Tessel Project. By its very nature, it gets people from one field interested in another field they don't know much about (web, hardware, and vice versa).

My advice: contribute even if you feel completely unqualified. We have a number of open starter issues.

This is how you learn. It's hard. You feel stupid. You put yourself out there on the internet. But we're here, and we want to help you.

Sometimes, what you need is a good project to learn on. Tessel was that project for me, and I hope it can be for you, too.

Love,

The Tessel Project's mission is to create a fully open source hardware & software platform that makes it easy and intuitive to develop Internet-connected devices.

With Tessel 1, we tackled the "easy and intuitive" part of that mission statement. This is the main strength of the Tessel platform. Thus far, we've best fulfilled these two of our core philosophies:

Developer experience is paramount. Tessel should be the fastest way to build an idea, regardless of your background (or lack thereof) in electrical engineering or computer programming. Branding, documentation, and engineering design decisions should always take this into account.

Device design should focus on user experience rather than on implementation. Tessel uses high level languages and modular plug & play hardware (see philosophy here) so that device creators can fully prototype and test device functionality before worrying about optimization and implementation specifics.

We kept these values with Tessel 2, and began efforts to help developers scale. This pushes toward another core belief:

Tessel should be practical to use. Tessel as a platform cannot have a big impact unless it is cost effective, reliable, and available for purchase. It needs to be possible to purchase Tessel hardware at affordable prices, from quantity one up to production-level quantities (10,000+).

(Emphasis added.)

Where we are: the vision of Tessel 2

When we designed Tessel 2, we envisioned it as the basis of full-scale products. At the core of its design was the key idea:

People should be able to scale the tools they use for prototyping all the way into production.

This is a radical idea.

If you're a Node developer, this prototyping --> production path feels familiar. Design is an iterative process; you understand technology and needs better as you build. Modularity lets you swap out packaged components according to your needs. Both Node.JS and Tessel subscribe to modularity. Node has proven out that this approach can scale to production.

In hardware, this is nearly unheard of. It is common to build a first prototype to show technical viability, then throw it out. For production, you start again from scratch to design a PCB that works with parts you can get at the x1000 scale.

With Tessel 2, we say: you shouldn't have to. This concept drove the following design decisions:

We chose components so that you can use the same ones in production. Every part used for Tessel 2 will continue to be manufactured and supported for a few years. Each can be sourced in low (100x) quantities.

Tessel 2 was designed in KiCad. This is perhaps the only free, open, fully-featured electrical engineering design tool available. Beyond publishing our design files, we want to make sure you can change and build on what we've created.

Tessel 2 is physically laid out so that you can easily remove features. A block diagram of Tessel's hardware corresponds to its physical layout, so if you don't need e.g. the ethernet port, you can remove it from the design (and save yourself the cost of the header) in your final product.

This takes open source hardware (OSHW) beyond just licensing. We want you to take our designs and use the parts of them you need in your own products. With your help, we can push the boundaries of OSHW. OSHW should be a platform for serious product development, not only a sharing marketplace for makers.

Openness promotes innovation. Tessel is fully open source, hardware and software, so that developers can create and build on these efforts, as projects and as products, without worry of legal hassle. This project seeks to expand and promote openness as a movement in both software and hardware, and be a leader in community developed hardware.

At the crossroads

Now that we've shipped Tessel 2, there are several things we could do:

Keep adding features in software, like support for more languages or features

Build more modules to expand the platform

Work on a "Tessel 3" that is an evolution of the board

Work on a "Tessel X" that uses some of the same tooling but suits a different niche

Something else, which approaches the mission in a different way

This is where the Steering Committee comes in: we determine the project's vision and create plans for future development. This is our first major vision decision since we moved to an open governance model.

Here are the factors that drive this decision:

Mission and core principles

Logistical implications of our decisions

Needs of our community

Critically, we need to pick projects that are well-scoped and highly focused. This lets us make measurable progress with the time and person-power we have available.

All of these projects are arguably worthwhile. Which is best?

Fulfilling the vision

Coming back to the core, we want to build the OSHW movement through our platform. Tessel 2's vision is well suited to this problem: the product lets people from varying backgrounds create products quickly and easily.

We've come some of the way towards making Tessel 2 the base for a product you can take to market. But we're not all the way there yet. Here are some of the issues we see:

It's not easy for most of the Tessel community to take the tools we've created so far and go to market. What do you do after you have a prototype– efficiency changes? Printing your own boards? Even if you knew what to do after building a prototype on Tessel 2, you might not know how to do it.

Connected device products tend to exist in a networked configuration. This usually involves several low-cost, low-power devices. A standard for usability in this vein is the ability to run on a battery for months to years. This makes Tessel 2 not well suited to a lot of product applications.

You can optimize to a point, but at the end of the day you are running JavaScript. This might not be as efficient or as reliable as you want your product to be. Additionally, you might have needs that are not supported in the language.

A path forward: Rust, Reach, and Fractal

We think we can work on these problems such that their solutions build upon each other. Here's the idea:

Work on improved Rust support. The Rust language executes code much faster and more robustly than JavaScript. It should serve well in production. The code is pretty legible, and it's a welcoming community with good documentation. We've already begun tooling for this on the tessel-rust repo. Work on Rust doesn't mean reduced support for or interest in JavaScript. We think they have the potential to play well together. Both will have first-class support.

Build on this for our Tessel Reach project: cheap, low-power boards. Think of a Reach board as a wireless extension cable from a Tessel 2 to a module– this is how it should feel to use one. You can see a bit more detail on this issue.

Use the JavaScript --> Rust compilation work to begin building the Fractal project. Fractal is software tooling to help you optimize your prototype into production. Explicit hardware requirements and memory-efficient software can let us begin to suggest hardware optimization. This would move toward comprehensible messaging. Examples might be: "Compile to Rust and reduce your file size of X to Y." "You aren't using Module Port B, remove it?" and "You're only using Y memory- you may want to consider this cheaper chip (link)".

What do you think?

This is the beginning of a plan. It's an outline of a roadmap of a vision, and it's going to be a lot of work.

For me, it's an inspiration. I want to work in the context of a grand plan. And it's my hope that this grand plan excites and inspires you, too.

When it comes down to it, that's the crux. What do you think? Is this something you're excited about building, and do these tools feel like they would be useful to you? Per our final core philosophy:

Community matters. This project should be a welcoming, inclusive, and respectful place. It’s important to communicate, to question, and to come together.

Please reach out on this issue, share your knowledge and use cases, and let us know what you think. We need to hear if you're excited, if you're unexcited, or if there's something in particular you want to do. Because in the end, the Tessel Project is built out of the community, and we can't do it without you.

See you soon.

Hello! Many of you are getting antsy about Tessel shipments. This is totally reasonable, and trust me - we hate the wait at least as much as you do.

We had thought Tessel 2s would begin shipping by now, but they are still in transit to fulfillment centers. Here's the latest information:

If you ordered a Tessel from the Seeed website (from this page): please contact Seeed directly. We do not have any information about your order; Seeed is handling everything about it, from money to manufacturing to shipping. Their support page is here. If we had to guess, we would guess your orders will ship out as soon as international pre-orders finish shipping.

If you pre-ordered a Tessel at tessel.io and are located in the United States: The Tessel 2s are en route to our fulfillment house in San Francisco. You can watch along with us as we track its progress from China to Los Angeles, through customs, and up to San Francisco (tracking). Once it arrives in San Francisco, it might take a few days for our fulfillment center to unbox everything and put it on shelves, and then a few more days as they sort out individual orders to each of your addresses. However, shipping is pretty fast once it gets sent, usually a day or two.

If you pre-ordered a Tessel at tessel.io and are international/outside the United States: Seeed is shipping these directly from the factory, so it will be more effective to contact their support directly than to email us. Their support page is here. They informed us last night that they will ship these orders this week.

For everyone: You will receive an email with tracking information when your order is sent. Thanks for sticking it out with us; we sincerely hope you find Tessel 2 worth the wait.

With love,