- Is it bright in here, or is it just me? Could we dim the lights a little bit? Over the course of its three seasons, Better Call Saul has transformed from this spinoff joke that Twitter liked to laugh about into an Emmy-nominated powerhouse drama series. Now, part of that is we get to revisit some of the lovable characters from Breaking Bad, but the other part is pure electricity. And I'm not talked just about the Chuck McGill kind, there's power off camera, too.

- You get paid when I get paid. I'm the rising tide that raises all dinghies. Now, pop quiz, what's the car?

- Better call Saul boasts a veteran props and special effects department with a penchant for tech tinkering, so whether we're talking about 3D model imprinted little yogurt mascots, or the most rigged bingo machine in television history, there's suddenly a ton of tech powering this show. [upbeat bass music] This entire last season of Better Call Saul is set into motion by tech. Someone has done the unthinkable, and gotten the upper hand on Mike Ehrmantraut by placing a GPS tracking device on his car, but if you're familiar with this show at all, you know no one maintains the upper hand on Mike for long. Of course he knows a guy who can get him his own black market military tech type tracking thing. In real life, even if we knew a guy, you or I couldn't get our hands on this thing. That's because, frankly, it doesn't exist. While based on realistic tech, Mike's GPS tracker is actually a custom build. Just a highly functional custom build, that is. Special effects and props gurus Jason Delap and Joseph Ulibarri told me that because Vince Gilligan had such a specific aesthetic in mind, they went ahead and just created their own device, probably using more complicated tech than a Garmin to begin with. Ulibarri would 3D model a design and then print it to see if something passed Gilligan's sniff test, and Delap would then use an Arduino to hook up the screen so that the actor portraying Mike could interact with something. They overlaid the brightness in post-production, but otherwise, all the lovely details of that piece of GPS tech are real. [upbeat bass music] One of the most memorable bits of gadgetry actually comes from the most ho-hum of consumer tech, the Roomba vacuum. In the aftermath of one of Jesse Pinkman's legendary blowout parties, the crew gave us an iconic view point by turning one of its cameras essentially into a Roomba-bot. Delap originally took a techie approach. He Bluetoothed the Roomba to a little phone interface that the effects and props teams came up with, however, when connectivity got bad, things got iffy. One of the actresses who was passed out on the floor, well Delap almost vacuumed up her hair. So instead, this bit of creative tech took a very analog turn. Delap had to control the Roomba himself. Quote, "I'd go forward, back up, "I had to mentally prepare for the role of the Roomba. "And it looks great. "Sometimes the fanciest tech work is analog "and you still have to get creative. "No matter how many things are out there "to make our lives easier, sometimes they don't work." If it's not already obvious, the tinkerers behind Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad have their handiwork in virtually every iconic scene from the series. That includes perhaps the most unforgettable moment from the Gilligan-verse thus far, that iconic final scene of Breaking Bad. So we all know that criminal mastermind and savvy science teacher Walter White rigged an M60 machine gun to automatically pop out of the trunk of his car and mow down rows of Nazis. Literally everyone including the folks at Mythbusters have broken down this sequence since it aired.

- Woo!

- That is Joseph Ulibarri's handiwork. And he relied on classic hobbyist tech, radio frequency controllers. To quote, "By the end, I had that all controlled wirelessly "so I could start the gun rotating back and forth, "pop the trunk and pull the trigger on the machine gun. "It was a little less Arduino, "more remote frequency controllers like you'd use for "a radio car. "But that was one of my favorite tech moments so far." In other words, it operates exactly like it does on screen. This makes it one of the most transparent, and therefore coolest, tech moments on T.V. to date. While neither Better Call Saul nor Breaking Bad screams tech like maybe your favorite sci-fi series crime procedural, clever technology on the show ran as rampant in Albuquerque as green chili. And as someone who lived in Albuquerque for awhile, let me tell you, there are a lot of green chilis. And judging on the work of Ulibarri and Delap, I expect there will be plenty of tech in season four of Better Call Saul, too. [upbeat music]