Month: October 2018

Huub Janssen from Janssen Precision Engineering is one of the former figureheads of the Design Principles for Precision Engineering training. His ambition was to spread know-how in the vein of Wim van der Hoek.

A longstanding wish of Huub Janssen of Janssen Precision Engineering has been fulfilled: he shared his knowledge in the same way that his mentor Wim van der Hoek did.

Janssen deems Van der Hoek ‘awe-inspiring.’ In the early 1980s, he was looking for a niche in which to spend his last university years at the Eindhoven University of Technology and came across a professional who worked mainly in precision mechanics. “Wim invited me to his monthly mornings. There he would put a large sheet of paper on the table and scribble down all kinds of problems. We would discuss them with a handful of students who each had their own graduation assignment and for two to three hours we would talk about progress and technical problems.’

Huub Janssen is the new figurehead of the Design Principles for Precision Engineering training course.

The main focus was on the content, the technical approach, the concept and how it is put into practice. ‘Everyone offered free solutions. One graduate would put down his problem and then five or six men would jump up to solve it in various ways. It was some game. That stimulation from Wim really appealed to me. I took to it like a fish to water. It goes without saying, I felt at home.’

In the ‘80’s, Janssen worked at ASML, made production equipment for LCDs at Philips in Heerlen, and then started an engineering firm dedicated to precision instrumentation. Education has always attracted him, but in recent decades entrepreneurship has taken priority.  ‘Just like Van der Hoek, I have always enjoyed discussing technical problems with young people. I also do that when coaching my employees,’ says Janssen.

Now that employees have taken over part of his duties, his thoughts have automatically turned to knowledge transfer. When approached by Jan van Eijk and Adrian Rankers of the Mechatronics Academy, partner of High Tech Institute, Janssen didn’t have to think twice.

Limburg’s flan

We are talking in the very space that Huub Janssen named after his great inspiration, Wim van der Hoek. Over Limburgs flan and coffee, the precision engineering entrepreneur raises a subject that engineers often bring up in conversation: the passion he already had for technology in his youth.

In Janssen Precision Engineering’s new meeting room, completely surrounded by glass. Huub Janssen named the space after his mentor.

During his high school years Janssen photographed birds. His challenge was to capture them in flight. He didn’t want to sit behind the camera all day long, so he came up with a solution. In a nesting box, he set up a Praktica – the SLR camera that still fitted a more or less within his budget – and put together a shutter mechanism with a light beam and photodetector. ‘Everything was arranged so that the Praktica shutter closed at the precise moment that the bird flew through the beam. An electric solenoid triggered the self-timer. Not with a normal motor, because it had to be bam! Done.’

He received his entrepreneurial spirit from home. His parents had a fruit company and his father often built machines himself, such as a machine to sort apples. During his last years at university, Huub devised a measuring scale which made it easier to fill fruit trays with a specific weight. Not ordinary scales because with those you would need to calculate back and forth and Janssen wanted to avoid that. ‘You could buy those kinds of scales for three thousand guilders, but that was a lot of money back then. I wanted something that would enable you to see in one go whether you had to add or take away a few apples. I was always thinking about things like that.’

He solved it with leaf springs, electronics and an optical sensor. ‘There were all kinds of Van der Hoek design principles in it,’ he laughs, referring to the professor whose Monday morning sessions he sat in on that time.

During his final years at university, Janssen developed an instrument that could map out wear and tear in fillings and molars. ‘Interferometry and optics were part of the solution. I had to position in six degrees of freedom within fractions of a micrometer, and I could completely break loose with new ideas. Moreover, I also had a real customer so it had to work eventually.’

Huub Janssen with the piëzo-knob, a component on which he has a patent; a revolutionary concept based on piëzo elements and a rotating mass, steps of 5 nanometres can be made.

After graduating in the eighties, Janssen worked at ASML on the first PAS2500 wafer stepper. ‘I had learned a lot from Van der Hoek, but at ASML I have been able to see where things can go wrong. With Van der Hoek you learn to design something statically determined. For example, you get stability with three support points. But not everyone is happy with a three-legged table. At ASML I learnt to understand when to apply specific design principles and when not to.’

For the PAS2500, they had initially developed a new interferometer  to measure the position of the stage in directions x and y. ‘We did this completely in accordance with the Van der Hoek design principles, with elastic elements and so on.  There was no hysterisis, but everything kept vibrating. There, I learnt that you cannot always apply Van der Hoek’s design principles in any situation. You have to know when you can and when you can’t,’ explains Janssen.

After ASML, he joined Philips in Heerlen, where he developed production equipment for LCDs. A few years later he started his own engineering office. ‘During my final university years, I also worked for a real customer with a real technical problem, including the demand for hardware. That was just my thing.’

In 2010 Huub Janssen received the Rien Koster prize in recognition of the high level at which he practices precision technology in his company Janssen Precision Engineering (JPE). In addition to the large amount of advanced work done for clients, the jury also emphasised Janssens’s attention to the coaching and training of his employees. JPE has since recorded thirty patents for its inventions.

Within JPE, more than ten years ago, Janssen started collecting and documenting technical principles and solutions. Initially for his employees, but also for the outside world. Whenever Janssen or his colleagues delve into something or have to come up with a technical solution, they record it. ‘We always have to figure something out or look it up again. How did that technical calculation go again? I thought: let’s do it properly once, and then the next time employees need it, they will also benefit from it. I started documenting the cases on one A4 sheet. ‘Everything is divided into categories such as ‘engineering fundamentals,’ ‘construction fundamentals,’ ‘dynamics and control’ and ‘construction design & examples.’

You have to invest time in it, ‘but then you also have something,’ says Janssen. ‘The technical problem, all the formulas that matter, all have to fit on that sheet of A4. That means only the essential information. In the meantime, it totals about fifty sheets of A4. Janssen thought that the information also had marketing value and started to publish it. That is how the precision point came about, a page on the Janssen Precision website where everything is accessible. ‘Even a professor at MIT mailed me to ask if he could use the knowledge in his lectures.’ Janssen also bundled the A4 cases in a handy booklet under Albert Einstein’s motto ‘never remember anything you can look up.’ He regularly receives orders from schools, competitors and customers.

Under Albert Einstein’s motto ‘never remember anything you can look up,’ Huub Janssen has documented precision cases. Each case fits on one sheet of A4. The knowledge is available at Precision Point on his website, and also available in print.

It is difficult to say whether the efforts also generate extra business. ‘We can, however, see that interested parties look at our core activities in high tech engineering and at our products after reading our precision point link.’

He said yes to Van Eijk and Rankers’ request to become the figurehead of the Design principles for precision engineering training course because education always attracted him. Much of the knowledge and experience in the design principles training course comes from the Wim van der Hoek ideology. ‘Just like Van der Hoek, I have always enjoyed discussing technical problems with young people. I also do that when coaching my employees,’ says Janssen.

For old students and colleagues, Van der Hoek can’t put a foot wrong. When they praised him at a party in honour of his 80th birthday, the Emeritus Professor responded: ‘I am praised in heaven in a shameful way.’

But after some thought, Janssen manages to dig up a criticism. ‘He liked to talk. He talked pretty quickly, so it was quite difficult for beginning university students, who still had to master the profession, to follow everything. You really had to pay attention, because a lot of information came flying at you in those few hours.’

Van der Hoek liked to talk, rapidly pointing in which direction to go, and he also had something to say. ‘He quickly came up with his own ideas about the path that solutions should take, and that was often astonishing.’

‘Thirty years ago, positioning at a micrometre was something from another planet.’

What was so special about Van der Hoek’s approach?

‘It has to do with the field. Thirty years ago, positioning at a micrometre was something from another planet. It is a field where you cannot simply apply normal functional elements such as bearings and gears. Even at this moment, it is still unexplored territory for many parties. Worldwide. Until the fifth year at university, we only learnt what other prospective engineers were learning: gears, drive shafts, v-belts and so on. But if you are going to position at a micrometre or a fraction thereof, then you can’t simply use those components. Then you get completely different solution directions and things such as reproducibility and avoiding backlash become important.’

You want to shape the design principles training in the spirit of Van der Hoek. What do you mean?

‘We are talking about design principles for precision engineering. That is the world of complex machines and instruments for the chip industry, astronomy and space travel. To position more accurately than a micrometre, you cannot simply use standard functional elements such as bearings. Then you come to elastic elements, no friction and those sort of things. After that it becomes exciting, because you are very close to physics.’

Janssen: ‘I can still remember that Van der Hoek asked his students to crawl in thought into a ball bearing.’

Manufacturers must recognise that they cannot buy standard parts from a catalogue. They have to think a bit further, analyse all the problems that may arise. Then you have to imagine things in your head, do ‘thought experiments’: where can things go wrong? If you can see that, the way to the solution is close. ‘I can still remember that Van der Hoek asked his students to crawl in thought into a ball bearing, to imagine the outer ring and inner ring with all the balls in between. We had to make ourselves so small that we were sitting between those spinning bullets. Then you see that the ball on one side is against the ring and on the other side has room to play. Next you see that a bullet isn’t completely round, it has indents and doesn’t turn well. If it is an indent of a micrometre then it means a micrometre of error. You don’t have to have much experience, but you do need a lot of imagination to be able to do thought experiments.’

What is specific about your contribution to the training?

‘The way solutions are reached is important. I don’t have a lot to do with formulas. Of course, they are needed, but calculating is the last ten percent of the job. Primarily, designers need to get a feel for the details. What should they pay attention to? How do they solve matters? You first need to know where things can go wrong and then come up with a good conceptual direction. I especially want to instil intuition. Calculation techniques will come after that.’

That’s why I want to introduce case studies. Van der Hoek did that in his Des Duivels prentenboek in which he published unsuccessful projects. ‘Participants thus get to work alone and in groups. Then we have a large group discussion. I don’t want a lecture, I prefer interaction.’

This article is written by René Raaijmakers, tech editor of High-Tech Systems.

Herman Roebbers is an advanced expert at Capgemini Engineering and has been working on embedded systems and parallel processing since the mid-1980s. He is also an external advisor to the EEMBC working groups Ulpmark, Iotmark and Securemark, and ultra-low power trainer in the workshop “Ultra-low power for the Internet of Things.“

In the pursuit of battery-less IoT, it is important to use energy as efficiently as possible. By using an encryption library as an example, Herman Roebbers shows how small tweaks to the tooling and chip settings alone can have a huge impact on consumption.

How can I reduce the energy consumption of my IoT system towards ultra-low power? This question is becoming more and more relevant as we continue to increase our expectations of IoT devices. Ultimately, the goal is that systems require so little energy, they can harvest it from their environment and no longer need batteries.

To achieve this, we need to work in two directions, increasing harvest yields and reducing consumption. The first is being addressed: new materials and methods to make and post process solar cells produce ever-higher yields. Progress is also being made in the field of RF energy harvesting. The Delft startup Nowi, for example, has made special chips that are very good at this. Furthermore, a lot of research is being done on new materials to convert temperature differences into energy more efficiently. We are also working hard on increasingly efficient converters that convert harvested energy into required voltage(s) and ensure efficient energy storage, for example, in rechargeable batteries or supercapacitors.

A case study for ultra-low power

An earlier Bits&Chips article gave an overview of all aspects that are important to save energy: from chip substrate, transistor selection, processor architecture and the circuit board to driver, OS, coding tools and coding styles up to the application. In the meantime, the table has been expanded somewhat.

A recent case illustrates the effect of different mechanisms on energy consumption. EEMBC just released a benchmark to determine the energy needed for several typical tls (transport layer security) operations. Tls is part of an https implementation and, as such, is essential for setting up a secure connection. The benchmark has been ported to an evaluation board that supports cryptography through the Arm Mbedtls library.

We can use that process to show what each optimization step delivers. For this purpose, we first perform a baseline measurement each time. The benchmarking framework uses an energy monitor from Stmicroelectronics and an Arduino Uno. The Arduino is used as a uart interface towards the device under test (dut, Figure 1).

Figure 1: The setup for measuring power consumption

We also use the development environment Atollic Truestudio 9.0.1 for STM32, which uses a proprietary version of the GCC compiler, as well as the Stm32cubemx software, which can generate (initialization) code for peripherals and thus considerably simplifies configuration.

Step 1: Look at the compiler settings

If we do a baseline measurement with a non-optimized version (setting -O0) at 80 MHz (highest speed) and 3.0 volts, this results in a Securemark score of 505. If we change the optimizer setting to -O1, this makes a huge difference: we’re going to 1336! The optimizer settings for -Og and -O2 don’t make much difference, but if we go to -O3 or -Ofast, things will go even better: 1490.

This demonstrates what you can achieve with the compiler settings alone. The ideal settings, however, can differ per function. In our case, for example, there is no difference between -O3 and -Ofast, but this is not always the case. So, it may pay off to choose the settings per function or per file separately.

With the compiler settings -O2, -O3 and -Ofast, programming errors may appear that do not occur with other settings. Timing can change, and it is necessary to qualify variables that are used in multiple contexts (e.g. normal and interrupt context) as volatile to avoid problems.

Step 2: Look at the pll

Microcontrollers nowadays have very extensive settings for all kinds of clock signals on the chip. One of those settings concerns the frequency multiplier (pll). This can be used to multiply and divide a low frequency to create all kinds of other clock speeds.

In our case, the frequency of the internal oscillator is 16 MHz. To make 80 MHz out of that, we cannot simply multiply it by five, unfortunately. We have a choice of two settings: the first is to divide by 1, multiply by 10 and then divide by 2. The second option is to divide by 2, multiply by 20 and then divide by 2 again.

That gives different scores: 1462 against 1490. The result in both cases is 80 MHz, but the second method is two percent more economical. The lower the clock frequencies, the less energy you lose, and the sooner you divide the clock frequency, the better.

If you have enough time at your disposal, you can also use the processor without pll, because that’s actually quite an energy guzzler. With the built-in oscillator, we can generate a maximum frequency of 48 MHz, which results in a 4 percent higher score. The disadvantage is that it takes a bit longer: 80/48 = 1.66 times longer to be precise.

The Nucleo L4A6ZG development board from STMicroelectronics offers a lot of tools to optimize energy use.

Step 3: Turn off unnecessary clocks

Now that we have explored a few things, we can choose a setting and further optimize from there. We start quite conservatively: -O1 and a frequency of 80 MHz via our second pll setting. This brings our Securemark score to 1336.

The next step is to turn off all superfluous clocks. In our case, the clock to the uart and all i/o ports can be turned off. This saves between 2.5 and 2.9 mW and gives a score of 1448. This costs 1448/1336 = 1.08 times less energy (8 percent gain).

Step 4: Optimize the memcpy function

During the execution of cryptographic functions, the memcpy function is regularly used. Opting for an optimized version yields a five percent profit in the case of GCC. The IAR compiler already provides an optimized version. This allows us to increase our score to 1524. Profit: 5 percent.

Step 5: Tighten the thumbscrews

Now we can see if we can also do it with a low clock frequency. With that, we could lower the core voltage. For our mcu, this core voltage should be 1.2 V for frequencies above 26 MHz. For simplicity, we take 24 MHz, a standard frequency in the menu of the msi oscillator, where the pll can remain off – another 4 percent gain: 1588.

We can also test whether we can safely set the compiler optimizations a bit more aggressively. If we go to setting -O2, we arrive at a score of 1691 – another 6.4 percent gain.

Step 6: Reduce voltages

We have already prepared the clock frequency for allowing a lower core voltage. Now we are actually going to set it. The result is beautiful: 2021, almost 20 percent profit!

The power supply voltage can also be a bit lower. We started at 3.0 V, but if we go to 2.4 V, that again gives an improvement of 26 percent. We can go even further to 1.8 V if necessary. We haven’t done that here, but if we extrapolate, we can expect a further saving of a third.

Conclusion

With a few simple measures, energy consumption can already be drastically reduced towards ultra-low power. In our case study, a factor of five to seven is easily achievable compared to a non-optimized version.

However, I have limited myself here to tooling and chip settings. With additional measures in other areas, tens of percent extra improvement can be achieved. Therefore, an embedded system without batteries is within reach.

This article is published by Bits&Chips.

Design Principles is one of the most renowned training courses given by the Mechatronics Academy and High Tech Institute. Our ‘mechatronics men’ Jan van Eijk and Adrian Rankers have renewed the training course and asked Huub Janssen to assume the role of course director. The course remains firmly anchored in the foundations laid down by the renowned Professor Wim van der Hoek. The biggest changes are the addition of new top specialists and new focus points. The training course is now known as Design Principles for Precision Engineering.

It is pretty risky to redesign one of the most renowned training courses in the Netherlands’ high tech world. Yet we had no other option. Piet van Rens, who was for a long time the face of the course, wanted to considerably limit his work as a structural engineering trainer. He has a lot of fun in the projects he does for ASML, but his agenda is just too full.

Piet van Rens was for many years the face of the Design Principles training course. He continues as a course trainer but is no longer a course director.

Thus, Van Eijk and Rankers had to go in quest of successors. They took advantage of this situation to reformulate the training course itself. For approximately a year now, the training programme has been in the hands of a strong team of specialists from the Dutch precision world. In addition to Van Rens, a handful of top experts have been found, to immerse the course participants in trusted fundamental knowledge and insights, as well as in relevant additions to the engineering field. The new faces include Huub Janssen from Maastricht’s Janssen Precision Engineering, Chris Werner and Roger Hamelinck from Entechna Engineering in Eindhoven, the precision engineering Professor from the University of Twente, Dannis Brouwer and Kees Verbaan from NTS. Van Eijk and Rankers’s debut in June 2018 was a success. Thereafter, the new training programme was fully booked and awarded an average score of 8.4.

The knowledge and experience for the design principles training course Design Principles comes from the ideology of Wim van der Hoek, the renowned Professor of precision technology, to which Dutch high tech owes a lot of its design principles and knowledge. Van der Hoek devised a number of essential design principles in the sixties and seventies, such as the famous hole hinges, with which machine builders could achieve nanometre precision.

In addition, Van der Hoek gained great fame by collecting unsuccessful designs and and included them in Chapter 13 of his infamous Des Duivels prentenboek. He stated that you learn best by making mistakes. The easiest and cheapest training is by getting to know those mistakes. ‘This reference work became so well known that it became an honour for someone to have their design and improvements added to it,’ says Piet van Rens.

Van der Hoek’s successors, Professors Rien Koster and Herman Soemers, are enriching that basis. ‘The new style of design principle training elaborates on the legacy which we have had in the Netherlands for decades, namely to design properly using the correct design principles,’ says course leader Adrian Rankers of Mechatronics Academy, the partner in charge of the mechatronics training at the High Tech Institute.

Huub Janssen is the new figurehead of the Design Principles training course. Like Piet van Rens, he comes from the school of thought of Professor Wim van der Hoek. The precision engineer honoured his mentor by naming the new meeting and demo room at Janssen Precision Engineering after the person who had inspired him, Wim van der Hoek.

The updated training course includes countless new elements. For example, there is more attention given to damping and to advanced elastic elements which have a somewhat larger stroke. Elastic elements are often limited in their range of motion, but there are concepts available which achieve larger strokes. This is one of the research topics of Professor Dannis Brouwer from the University of Twente, who imparts a day of training on flexure mechanisms.

Brouwer also handles energy compensation and gravity compensation techniques (think of the kitchen cabinets that you can open and close vertically and which can stay in each position whilst they move up and down easily).’That includes balancing mass-like issues,’ says Adrian Rankers. ‘As in a complex robot system where you try to get rid of the reaction forces on the floor by having another body simultaneously make the right movements that precisely compensate the forces. That can be complicated, so we have called it energy compensation. But you can also call it energy balancing.’

Rankers emphasizes that the ‘mechatronic context’ recurs throughout the training. ‘On the one hand it provides additional requirements for mechanics, on the other hand it also offers alternative solution space. If previously you needed to create a positioning system, you did that with a cam drive and a drive chain up to the element that you had to position properly. In that chain you used to encounter all sorts of friction and slack – all of which is very annoying. But in a mechatronic movement system you have sensors on your payload. They tell you exactly what the position or position error is. In principle, you won’t be worried if there is a bit of friction or play in-between, because you have the information and you can immediately compensate for it. These kinds of trends make the subject choice for the Design Principles training shift, although it is still true that you can never get a high-quality system solution with rattling mechanics,’ emphasises Rankers. ‘In the less important topics we have made some room for new subjects.’

‘We have a long history here of designing properly using correct design principles,’ says Adrian Rankers, director of Mechatronics Academy. ‘Wim van der Hoek started that off, Rien Koster and Herman Soemers are continuing it.’

The course director Huub Janssen has given himself the goal of giving shape to the design principles course in the spirit of Van der Hoek. ‘We are talking about design principles for precision engineering. That is the world of complex machines and instruments for the chip industry, astronomy and space travel. To position more accurately than a micrometer, you cannot simply use standard functional elements such as bearings. Then you come to elastic elements, no friction and those sort of things. After that it becomes exciting, because you are very close to physics.’

Janssen says that manufacturers must recognise that they cannot buy standard parts from a catalogue. They have to think a bit further, analyse all the problems that may arise. Then you have to imagine things in your head, do ‘thought experiments’: where can things go wrong? If you can see that, the way to the solution is close.

During his part-time professorship, Van der Hoek asked his students to do thought experiments. Janssen: ‘I can still remember that Van der Hoek asked his students to crawl in thought into a ball bearing, to imagine the outer ring and inner ring with all the balls in between. We had to make ourselves so small that we were sitting between those spinning balls. Then you see that the ball on one side is against the ring and on the other side has room to play. Next you see that a ball isn’t completely round, it has indents and doesn’t turn well. You don’t have to have much experience, but you do need a lot of imagination.’

It is no coincidence that Janssen wants to enrich the training by injecting experience and exercises. ‘The way solutions are reached is important. I don’t have a lot to do with formulas. Of course they are needed, but calculating is the last ten percent of the job. Primarily, designers need to get a feel for the details. What should they pay attention to? How do they solve matters? You first need to know where things can go wrong and then come up with a good conceptual direction. I especially want to instil intuition. Calculation techniques will come after that.’

He mainly uses case-studies, just as Van der Hoek did in his Des Duivels prentenboek. ‘Participants thus get to work alone and in groups. Then we have a large group discussion. I don’t want a lecture, I prefer interaction.’

Exercises, interaction and working with practical cases are distinguishing factors in the structural training course that the Mechatronics Academy and the High Tech Institute bring to the market. In other organisations, the training is also available as a three-day variant.

Piet van Rens also has experience as a trainer for this three-day variant. He wants to emphasise that participants in the short version really miss something. ‘Some customers require employees sent by the temporary work agencies to complete a design principles training course. This means that some engineering firms then choose on a costs basis or for an evening version.’

Van Rens thinks this is a not such a sensible choice. Practical exercises are the most valuable component of the Design Principles training course. They ensure that the contents really sink in and the participants actually understand and apply them to their work. This hands-on element is precisely what is killed in the shortened version. “The three-day and evening training courses are not bad, but they skimp on content, cutting corners to fit into less time. This effect is noticed more when learning after a normal working day, people are tired in the evenings. If you only give lectures, then the outcome is really less effective,’ states Van Rens.

This article is written by René Raaijmakers, tech editor of High-Tech Systems.

You can turn writing good software security into a good habit. Something you barely stop to think about, like brushing your teeth or putting on your seat belt. High Tech Institute is working with the specialists at Hungary’s Cydrill to teach you how.
‘We teach developers how not to code.’ László Drajkó likes unsettling his conversational partners with this bold statement. Yet that’s what the software security courses taught by his company, Cydrill, revolve around: teaching coders the professional discipline to prevent weak spots in their software.

Perhaps ‘discipline’ is too strong a word. Drajkó thinks it’s more comparable to putting on your seat belt. ‘You no longer notice you’re putting it on. In the same way, you can teach yourself the good habit of writing good software security. And then you’ll automatically avoid pitfalls, without stopping to think about it. We teach people to instinctively use good coding habits.’ Secure coding doesn’t take more time, Drajkó says. ‘It takes time to learn how, but once you have there’s no difference.’

Teaching people to write secure code is a labour-intensive endeavour. Break-ins are continually happening around the world, exposing vulnerabilities. It takes a sizeable team to keep up with all that information and work it into training material as case studies. ‘An independent teacher would spend four hours staying up to date and incorporating new material for every hour of class,’ Drajkó estimates.

That’s why High Tech Institute is partnering with Cydrill, a specialist fully focused on training people to write secure code. The Hungarian company is especially focussed on security for embedded systems.

‘We aren’t selling painkillers and band-aids, but building an immune system that’s extremely resilient,’ say Ernõ Jeges (left) and László Drajkó (right), who visited the High Tech Campus in Eindhoven last summer.

The Commodore 64 and the ZX Spectrum

Cydrill is located in Hungary’s capital, Budapest. In the eighties young László Drajkó had access to computers, though within the Russian sphere of influence that access was very limited. His first acquaintance came when he was twelve. ‘Science was non-political. The educational system was highly theoretical, but quite good. Behind the Iron Curtain, we had to rely on our brains and we had few other resources.’

Drajkó and his fellow students wrote their code on paper. ‘We ran it in our heads. We checked for coding mistakes that had never been implemented. We made our corrections on paper, too. Because when we finally had access to a machine, we wanted to feed it error-free programs. We barely had money or computers.’

In the mid-eighties the Hungarian coders were permitted to travel to Germany and Austria, where they were able to buy Commodore 64s and ZX Spectrums. ‘The generation before ours had to shell out millions of dollars for a computer, but suddenly we could buy a home computer for five hundred dollars. The PC had a major impact on our age group.’

In the mid-eighties Drajkó was studying computer science in Hungary. The Iron Curtain fell while he was still in college, which had a huge impact on him. A European Economic Community grant enabled him to attend the Delft University of Technology. The result was culture shock. His first few months in the Netherlands immersed him in ‘total miscommunication’.

Though he spoke English, Drajkó didn’t understand his advisors’ questions. ‘Not in terms of language, but conceptually. The educational approach was completely different. They’d ask things like, ‘László, what problem would you like to work on?’ And I’d say, ‘No, no, I don’t have any problems. Just tell me what code you want me to write and I’ll find the best algorithm for it.’ But then they said things like, ‘How would you like to change the world for the better?’ And I thought, ‘I’ve wound up in art school!’’

‘When I went to college in Delft, I thought I’d wound up in art school’ – László Drajkó on the culture shock he experienced as a Hungarian university student in the Netherlands.

Novell, Compaq and Microsoft

After twenty-five years working for international companies such as Novell, Compaq and Microsoft, Drajkó decided to invest in a training company. He wanted to share what he knew and was looking for a suitable niche. He found it in security. ‘I asked myself what was going wrong and one of the answers was cybersecurity.’

Some time ago Drajkó ran into two familiar faces, Zoltán Hornák and Ernõ Jeges. All three studied at the Budapest University of Technology, but Hornák and Jeges have known each other since 1990. That year, the Hungarian and the Serbian competed against each other in the second International Olympiad in Informatics in Minsk. A few years later, Jeges decided to study computer science in Budapest.

Hornák and Jeges became fast friends and during their doctoral research they conducted tests for Nokia, breaking into mobile telephones and networked systems. Demand was so high they abandoned their PhDs and started hacking systems on assignment. ‘White hat hacking was uncharted territory back then,’ Jeges says. ‘Very few companies were doing it. Nokia had a ton of assignments, and we realized we were learning more on the job than we were at the university.’

The penetration testing (pentesting) assignments poured in to their company, Search Lab: the pair were hired to break into networking hardware, set-top boxes and more. Most of the target systems were embedded. ‘Not many security companies focus on those, because you need to understand the system at the chip level. Most pentesting companies focus on websites and web services, but we explicitly specialize in embedded.’

The 2008 crisis hit Search Lab hard. In that same period, the mobile phone industry switched entirely to the Iphone and Android platforms. Hornák and Jeges lost most of their business from clients with whom they had a long history.

Their shared focus on security sparked the click with Drajkó. ‘The number of incidents is growing exponentially, while awareness is minimal,’ he explains. ‘Only a handful of companies are doing something about it. Everyone’s busy patching errors, but that doesn’t address the problem. Education is the golden opportunity to prevent a software security crisis. Our stance is that we aren’t selling painkillers and band-aids, but building an immune system that’s extremely resilient.’

Ernõ Jeges’s goal is not to teach people how to hack, but to instil paranoia.

Instil paranoia

In 2018 Drajkó and Jeges founded Cydrill, the company that focusses on trainings. The security industry is in constant motion and to keep up with it, Cydrill offers online training in addition to traditional classroom fare. For a modest annual fee, participants can shore up their knowledge using a digital gamification platform. The online approach also makes it easy to track results. ‘We measure our success by the way clients translate our expertise into coding habits,’ Drajkó says.

The need for inherently secure code is high, but not all developers are enthusiastic about security classes. ‘If you ask developers to choose a course from nineteen different options, security will probably come in at the bottom. It sounds very prescriptive. A new platform, new language or new architecture is much more appealing to them.’

Cydrill’s software security courses don’t teach developers how to hack. There are plenty of classes that do that, Drajkó says. Many of his clients in the US have experience with them. ‘But they’ve been turned off by them, because the course designers couldn’t relate it to their daily work.’

Drajkó believes that learning hacking techniques in order to prevent hacks is a waste of time. ‘It doesn’t matter whether it’s ethical hacking or hacking with bad intent. Because in terms of technology there’s no difference; it’s a question of morality.’

Drajkó believes that developers do need to be well versed in what exactly hacking is. ‘That’s why we address it. Participants also need to understand that hackers have infinite time and infinite resources. They make use of bots and third-party computers. In the embedded domain that use is growing in lockstep with the Internet of Things.’

That’s why Cydrill’s courses always start with a peek inside the hacker’s mind. ‘For example, we show them that a buffer overflow can be a problem,’ Jeges says. ‘That someone can take control that way, and it will no longer be your program that’s running.’

Jeges’s goal is not to teach people how to hack, but to instil paranoia. ‘The first day, participants go home feeling uneasy. They realize they’ve made mistakes in the past. That feeling is important. It has an impact we can’t achieve through online training.’ After that experience participants are all ears, Jeges notes with a smile. ‘Emotionally and intellectually.’

That makes the class ripe for covering best practices. ‘We show them the difference between well-meant attempts to make code hack-proof and actual best practices,’ Jeges says. ‘They can apply the new techniques and skills they learn the next day.’

Case studies are an important component of those best practices. ‘We use every incident that’s been global news,’ Jeges explains.

This article is written by René Raaijmakers, tech editor of Bits&Chips.