Josuah started out as a Monocle superfan, and now he's an essential team member and the most helpful person in our Discord server. Seriously, we don't understand how he owns those Github commits while also answering 90% of the questions that come our way.
As a product and platform for hackers and makers, community is essential to our success at Brilliant Labs, so we thought we'd get a bit personal and share the story behind one of the people who make Monocle so awesome to work on.
In his own words below:
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What is your background? How did you get started in augmented reality?
I got curious about Head-Up Displays, used in aircrafts even before computers: Fully analog, projecting the landing track as a 3D hologram, helping pilots landing in snow storms by night where nothing can be seen. Things like Head Up Flight. This got me curious.
How did you first hear about Monocle and how did you get involved with the project?
I received an invite on the chat server, and saw an FPGA and an MCU were involved in a tiny device. It caught my interest by the way it combined hardware and software to overcome its limitations.
What do you do at Brilliant Labs?
I do my best to provide hardware support: read documentation of the parts, try to get them to work, and most often, once things start working, Raj handles the integration, taking advantage of his long history of building hardware for technology products.
What's been your biggest challenge with making Monocle happen?
FPGAs are a bit tedious to get to boot. I broke a few while trying.
The OV5640 camera luckily has a data-sheet published (unlike the OV5645 for instance), and there is usually little chance to get more data about them. Just about trying!
What is your favorite use-case or “killer app” for AR?
I would like to try some inventory management system for tiny parts. Where you could tell “where is this part”, the system highlights on which shelf it is. That could play well with Gridfinity.
Why do you think community is the way to go when building a hardware project?
Many start noticing that they are more efficient if they collaborate rather than try to redo all the effort on their own side. There are too many things to solve in every domain so that time is wasted on competition.
What’s your advice for those who want to start building with Monocle?
Take a Monocle device or a Nordic DevKit or Dongle at hand, get the API at hand, and try some functions which caught your attention. Maybe previous ideas you had would resurface and things can start getting in shape. The chat server could also help figuring things out, and let us know where we should improve the doc.
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If you want to chat with Josuah and join our community, join us in Discord.