Embedded

Where electronics meets music, there is a board called Daisy. Created by ElectroSmith, Andrew Ikenberry, the goal of the board is to teach computers to sing. Andrew joined us to talk about music, audio processing, instruments, product design, and electronic manufacturing. 

See the Electrosmith website, specifically the Daisy Seed. The electro-smith github repository is extensive (with many Daisy Examples). Also see their YouTube channel. Electrosmith is offering 5% off until mid-March for folks with the coupon code mentioned in the show.

We mentioned a number of synths but the CHOMPI is particularly nifty.

Daisy Bell - Wikipedia (and where you might have heard that before (and if that doesn’t give “teach computers to sing” a creepy vibe, I don’t know what will)).

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Nordic Semiconductor empowers wireless innovation, by providing hardware, software, tools and services that allow developers to create the IoT products of tomorrow. Learn more about Nordic Semiconductor at nordicsemi.com, check out the DevAcademy at academy.nordicsemi.com and interact with the Nordic Devzone community at devzone.nordicsemi.com.

Helen Leigh joined us to talk about putting together conferences (including Teardown 2024), indie hardware producers (including via Crowd Supply), and building communities.

Teardown will be June 21-23 in Portland, OR, USA. More information about attending or presenting. Early bird tickets are available for a limited time! Teardown is put on by Crowd Supply, a company that helps hardware companies launch products.

Hardware Happy Hour Portland is a regular meetup that Helen organizes. Helen will be hosting a meetup in Oakland, CA, USA on Feb 15: Oakland Sound Hackers. She is also hosting a San Francisco, CA meetup on March 6: Open Hardware Happy Hour. 

Helen’s personal site is helenleigh.me. She has been on the show twice before in 355: Favorite Ways to Make Noises and 261: Blowing Their Fragile Little Minds.

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Memfault is making software the most reliable part of the IoT with its device reliability platform that enables teams to be more proactive with remote debugging, monitoring and OTA update capabilities. Try Memfault's new sandbox demo at demo.memfault.com. Embedded.fm listeners receive 25% off their first-year contract with Memfault by booking a demo here: https://go.memfault.com/demo-request-embedded

Chris and Elecia chat with each other about motor encoder reading methods, conferences coming up, soldering irons, schematic reviews, looking for a new job, and general life. 

Some conferences coming up in the embedded space:

• Embedded Online, April 29-May 4, virtual (Elecia will be speaking)

• Open Hardware Summit in May 3-4, Montreal, Canada

• Embedded World in April 9-11 in Nuremburg, Germany

Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories was purchased by Bantam Tools!

Starter soldering irons? It seemed like small pen-style ones were more popular than big soldering stations. See the Adafruit USB C Powered Soldering Iron - Adjustable Temperature Pen-Style - TS80P. Or for much less (but you can write your own firmware!), the Pinecil. And one vote for the RT Soldering Pen on Tindie because it uses Weller RT tips (which are more expensive than the soldering pen but much less expensive than the Weller station that uses the RT tips). 

Embedded Artistry has excellent advice for the role of the firmware in schematic reviews. 

Adafruit Playgrounds looks like a neat place to write up your project. 

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Nordic Semiconductor empowers wireless innovation, by providing hardware, software, tools and services that allow developers to create the IoT products of tomorrow. Learn more about Nordic Semiconductor at nordicsemi.com, check out the DevAcademy at academy.nordicsemi.com and interact with the Nordic Devzone community at devzone.nordicsemi.com.

Anders Nielsen joined us to talk about why the 6502 is the best processor. 

Anders also sells 65uino kits on his store: imania.dk. For more explanation of what they are, how they work, attaching peripherals, and programming in assembly, look at Anders’ YouTube channel @AndersNielsenAA, read his blog on abnielsen.com, or read about it on its Hackaday.io project page.**

We also mentioned Ben Eater’s 6502 Kit, Adrian's Digital Basement - YouTube, and Rodnay Zaks’ Programming the 6502.

** Anders was a two time semi-finalist for the Hackaday Challenge but we didn’t talk about that. Here is his Hackaday page.

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Memfault is making software the most reliable part of the IoT with its device reliability platform that enables teams to be more proactive with remote debugging, monitoring and OTA update capabilities. Try Memfault's new sandbox demo at demo.memfault.com. Embedded.fm listeners receive 25% off their first-year contract with Memfault by booking a demo here: https://go.memfault.com/demo-request-embedded.

Chris and Elecia talk about cars, fleeting moments of fame, their year, and the sorry state of tools in the embedded space.

Chris became internet famous for asking a car dealership’s chatbot (powered by ChatGPT) to generate Python code for fluid dynamics problems. After this, someone else asked the chatbot to sell a car for $1. 

Pass the Bricks is an organization that takes Lego bricks and turns them into sets for kids who don’t have any. Speaking of re-use, contact the show if you’d like to get in touch with Nelson.

Chris is on 4 tracks on Flavigula’s album Nine Sided Die. He also enjoyed putting together an EMSL Bulbdial clock kit. 

Elecia will be speaking at the Embedded Online Conference.

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Ralph Hempel spoke with us about the development of Lego Mindstorms from hacking the initial interface to running Debian Linux as well as programming Mindstorms in Python. Happy 25th birthday to Lego Mindstorms!

Pybricks is a MicroPython based coding environment that works across all Lego PoweredUp hubs and on the latest Mindstorms elements. The creators are David Lechner and Laurens Valk.

Ralph was the first person to boot a full Debian Linux distro on the brick, see EV3Dev, a Debian Linux for Lego Mindstorms EV3. 

BrickLink was originally a site for third party resellers of new and used Lego sets and elements. The site was purchased by the Lego Group a few years ago. It's still a great place to buy individual parts - for example a 4 port PoweredUp hub to run the new PyBricks on :-)

ReBrickable is a site dedicated to taking off-the-shelf Lego sets, and creating something new with the set. In particular see the MOCs Designed by LUCAMOCS, fantastic Technic vehicles as well as interesting designs for vehicle subsystems.

Yoshihito ISOGAWA - YouTube is an absolute genius at coming up with practical applications of new LEGO Elements. Ralph recommends his books as “awesome to read”.

LEGO uses 18 Cucumbers to build real Log House 

Ralph highly recommends Test Driven Development for Embedded C  by James Grenning (who has been on the show: 270: Broccoli is Good Too, 109: Resurrection of Extreme Programming, and 30: Eventually Lightning Strikes).

Origami Simulator and Elecia’s origami generating python code on github

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Nordic Semiconductor empowers wireless innovation, by providing hardware, software, tools and services that allow developers to create the IoT products of tomorrow. Learn more about Nordic Semiconductor at nordicsemi.com, check out the DevAcademy at academy.nordicsemi.com and interact with the Nordic Devzone community at devzone.nordicsemi.com.

Yanina Bellini Saibene joined us to discuss teaching, localization, barriers to learning coding, and global communities. 

Yani works on Teach Tech Together (https://teachtogether.tech/) with Greg Wilson. It is a fantastic resource if you are learning to teach. It is available in English and Spanish. She also works on The Carpentries which teaches coding and data science skills to researchers worldwide. 

Yani has a site (yabellini.netlify.app) that includes the courses she has online (for free). She is also the community manager of rOpenSci and is part of R-Ladies.

You can find Yani on fosstodon.org/@yabellini.

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Chris and Elecia talk about their favorite processors, their breakfast preferences, large language model ethics, presents, and Eeyore's birthday.

Elecia’s new edition of her book  Making Embedded Systems is finished! (Except for a couple months of tech reviews, updating, copyediting, and drawings.) It will be out in March.

All of the back issues of Byte Magazine

Chris’ radio kit that he mentioned but didn’t name is the QRP Labs QCX+ 5W CW Transceiver.

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Nordic Semiconductor empowers wireless innovation, by providing hardware, software, tools and services that allow developers to create the IoT products of tomorrow. Learn more about Nordic Semiconductor at nordicsemi.com, check out the DevAcademy at academy.nordicsemi.com and interact with the Nordic Devzone community at devzone.nordicsemi.com.

Kevin Lannen is an embedded systems engineer making powered wheelchairs safer. This sounded interesting to us.

Kevin works at LUCI Mobility (luci.com). Check out their tear jerker introduction video as well as technical description of over-the-air update concerns on smart wheelchairs. We also talked about the app that goes with the system: LUCI View.

You can find Kevin on Twitter (@kevlan) and LinkedIn.

Go Baby Go - The Adaptive Sports Connection

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Memfault is making software the most reliable part of the IoT with its device reliability platform that enables teams to be more proactive with remote debugging, monitoring and OTA update capabilities. Try Memfault's new sandbox demo at demo.memfault.com. Embedded.fm listeners receive 25% off their first-year contract with Memfault by booking a demo here: https://go.memfault.com/demo-request-embedded

Marian Petre spoke to us about her research on how to make software developers better at developing software.

Marian is an Emeritus Professor of the School of Computing & Communications at the Open University in the United Kingdom. She also has a Wikipedia page. 

The short version of How Expert Programmers Think About Errors is on the NeverWorkInTheory.org page along with other talks about academic studies on software development topics.  

The longer version is a keynote from Strange Loop 2022: "Expert Software Developers' Approach to Error".

This concept as well as many others are summarized in Software Design Decoded: 66 Ways Experts Think (Mit Press) by Marian Petre and Andre van der Hoek (MIT Press, 2016). The book’s website provides an annotated bibliography. Marian has also co-written Software Designers in Action: A Human-Centric Look at Design Work.

She is current conducting inquiries into:

• Code dreams: This research studies whether software developers dream about coding – and, if so, the nature of those dreams.  Following on from work on software developers’ mental imagery and cognitive processes during programming, this project investigates developers’ experience of coding in their dreams (whatever form that takes), and whether the content of such dreams provides insight into the developers’ design and problem solving.

• Invisible work that adds value to software development: The notion of ‘invisible work’ – activity that adds value in software development but is often overlooked or undervalued by management and promotion processes – arose repeatedly in discussions at Strange Loop 2022.  Developers asked for evidence they could use to fuel conversations -- and potentially promote change -- in their organisations. This research aims to capture the main categories of ‘invisible work’ identified by developers (e.g., reducing technical debt; improving efficiency; addressing security; development of tools and resources; design discussions; …), and to gather concrete examples of the value that work adds to software.  

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Chris and Elecia discuss the pros and cons of completing one project or starting a dozen. 

Elecia’s 2nd edition of Making Embedded Systems is coming out in March. (Preview is on O’Reilly’s Learning System.) She’s working on a companion repository that is already filled with links and goodies: github.com/eleciawhite/making-embedded-systems. 

If you’d like to know more about signal processing, check out DSPGuide.com aka The Scientist and Engineer's Guide to Digital Signal Processing By Steven W. Smith, Ph.D. And as noted in last week’s newsletter, there is an interesting overlap between smoothies and the Fourier Transform. 

Giang Vinh Loc used  Charles Lohr’s RISCV on Arduino UNO to boot Linux (in 16 hours). 

We also talked a bit about Greg Wilson’s recent episode with Elecia (Embedded 460: I Don’t Care What Your Math Says).

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Thanks to Nordic for sponsoring this week's show!

Nordic Semiconductor empowers wireless innovation, by providing hardware, software, tools and services that allow developers to create the IoT products of tomorrow. Learn more about Nordic Semiconductor at nordicsemi.com, check out the DevAcademy at academy.nordicsemi.com and interact with the Nordic Devzone community at devzone.nordicsemi.com.

Author, engineer, manager, and professor, Dr. Greg Wilson joined Elecia to talk about teaching, science in computer science, ethics, and policy.

The request for curriculum that started the conversation was the Cost of Change, part of NeverWorkInTheory which summarizes scientific literature about software development. 

Greg is the founder of Software Carpentry, a site that creates curriculum for teaching software concepts (including data and library science). Software Carpentry has great lessons for those who want to learn about software, data, and library science. It is a great site if you are teaching, trying to get someone else to teach, learning, or looking for some guidance on how to do the above. Check out their reading list.

Greg’s site is The Third Bit. Here you can find his books including full copies of several of his books including The Architecture of Open Source Applications, Teaching Tech Together, and most recently Software Design by Example. 

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Professor AnnMarie Thomas spoke with us about playful learning through joy,  whimsy, surprise, and meeting new people. 

We also spoke with AnnMarie about how adults can foster an environment that encourages innovation. See more about that (and the interviews of various engineers and makers) in her book Making Makers: Kids, Tools, and the Future of Innovation

You can find AnnMarie on Mastodon: mastodon.social/@AnnMariePT

If you want to know more about squishy circuits, check out AnnMarie’s TED talk: Hands-on science with squishy circuits (or the related book Squishy Circuits (21st Century Skills Innovation Library: Makers as Innovators)).

She is the head of The Playful Learning Lab at the University of St. Thomas where she is a professor of engineering and entrepreneurship. 

We also talked about the LEGO Foundation. More about that on LearningThroughPlay.com

AnnMarie suggested the cephalopod-centric novel The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler. Elecia countered with The Soul of an Octopus by Sy Montgomery (non-fiction).

And now, a question for you to ponder, what is your most meaningful learning experience?

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Trond Snekvik spoke with us about developing VSCode extensions and Bluetooth meshes.

Trond is a Staff Software Engineer at Nordic Semiconductor.

Nordic’s Visual Studio Code Extensions include device tree and kconfig support for the Zephyr project as well as tools for nRF Connect. 

Trond’s github page: github.com/trond-snekvik

In 329: At Least 32-Bits, Thank You, Kate Stewart of the Linux Foundation spoke with us about Zephyr in 2020 

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Thank you to Christopher for providing a picture of what may (or may not) be a troll.

Chris and Elecia chat about their ongoing efforts to create and learn. Then they answer some listener questions. 

Duck quacks do echo but the echoes seem to align in phase so that there is no interruption making the echo sounds like an extension of the quack (Mythbusters episode in which Jamie says “Quack, damn you!”)

Elecia continues to work on Making Embedded Systems, 2nd Edition. The early release copy is available on the O’Reilly Learning System.

Classpert is offering an asynchronous cohort for Elecia’s Making Embedded Systems course.  You'd be going through the class with others and there will be discussions and mentor (and Elecia’s) help on the Discord. No live classes but you get access to the best bits of the previous live classes. Class starts in September.

Tickets are on sale for the tenth annual Hackaday Supercon is Nov 3-5, 2023 in Pasadena, CA. Someone there will be giving out stickers. More details to follow on that front. 

Elecia is enjoying OrigamibyBoice Crease Pattern Class YouTube series. (It is a prereq for The Plant Psychologist’s Origami Design Class.)

Last week’s newsletter (sign up here!) had tidbits about learning the Kalman filter. Some of that came from Elecia’s blog post about it, some were fresh.  There doesn’t seem to be a good introduction to semantic webs in linguistics. Here is a too-dense article about Semantic Maps as Metrics on Meaning from a Linguistics Discovery Journal.

If you like the show and would like to support the show, we now take Ko-fi donations (https://ko-fi.com/embedded), as well as Patreon and reviews in your favorite podcasting app. 

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Damien George spoke with us about developing with and for MicroPython while Elecia tries not to spill all the secrets about her client.

To start at the beginning, you probably want to check out micropython.org. Wait, no, one step back. Before listening to the show, you probably should read the Wikipedia MicroPython entry because we kind of start in the middle in the show.

You can find the code on github: github.com/micropython/micropython.

The PyBoard can be found on store.micropython.org. It is out of stock but lead time trends show parts may be available soon(ish).

For more about branes, Lie point symmetries  and other physics fun stuff, check out Damien’s list of papers on dpgeorge.net.

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Natalie Friedman joins us to discuss when, where, how, and why robots should wear clothing. Natalie is a PhD candidate at Cornell Tech. 

Natalie’s website is natalie-friedman.com and you can find her papers in the research section. She has an Instagram account: @natalie.victoria.f

AIForGood shows several robots dressed in home, business and social attire.

Roomba cosplaying a mouse (Instructable)

Pepper is an android-ish robot made by SoftBank. There are many clothing lines devoted to dressing it for whatever occasion you need, simply search for Pepper robot clothing. What could go wrong?

Natalie recommended Fashion Is Spinach by Elizabeth Hawes. It is fascinating.

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Uri Shaked surprises us with a chat about silicon design when we were expecting to talk about a web-based board simulator. 

If you want to try your hand at silicon design, check out Tiny Tapeout, a way to possibly get your design on to real silicon. The digital design guide is a great way to start looking at how chips work.

If you aren’t quite ready for silicon, Wokwi has a Verilog simulator where you can learn to do the digital design. The Verilog Simon Game on Wokwi is amazing. 

Wokwi is a web-Based simulator, simulating processors, boards, and peripherals. You can build a whole system there, from Dancing Servos to 7-Segment display from 30  LCDs and Arduino Mega to Raspberry Pi Pico boards you can program in C when you click More Options on the front page. You can also create your own peripheral using the Chip API. Or learn to use Zephyr on Wokwi.

And now there is Wokwi for VS Code. 

All that and Wokwi is open source: github.com/urish

Uri recommends reading Relax for the same result by Derek Sivers

Previously on Embedded 396: Untangle the Mess

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Nathan Jones has been talking about building command line interfaces, good design practices in C, creating MCU boards, wielding the PIC of destiny, and going beyond Arduino. As we are too lazy to attend the conferences, we asked him to give us the highlights. 

Nathan is giving two conference talks at Crowd Supply’s Teardown 2023 June 23-24 in Portland, Oregon:

• Make Your Own MCU Board

• Build HackerBox #0040 and Wield the PIC of Destiny!

He spoke recently at the Embedded Online Conference about Object Oriented Programming (well, really good design practices). He has a related github repository so you can look at the examples for yourself. He also gave a workshop on creating a simple command line interface (another excellent github repo full of examples).

Probably the best place to start is his Embedded for Everyone Wiki where he collects all the bits and pieces you might want to know about getting into embedded systems.

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Julia Evans spoke with us about how computers compute. We discussed number representation including floating point as well as Julia’s extensive collection of ‘zines and comics.

Julia’s zines about debugging, managers, Linux commands, and more are available on WizardZines.com. If you want samples, check out the comics section. Also, the experiments (aka playgrounds) are great additions to the zines (and fun on their own), letting you explore without changing your own DNS or removing all the files from your root directory. If you want to check out numbers, look at memory-spy (or from other sites like https://float.exposed/ and https://integer.exposed/)

Julia also has a detailed blog on jvns.ca and active github repositories

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Phillip Johnston of Embedded Artistry, Tyler Hoffman of Memfault, and Elecia White discuss the software tasks that tend to fall through the cracks after the device has all its features but before it is in customers' hands. Noah Pendleton of Memfault was the moderator. 

You can see the video on the Embedded YouTube channel or directly from memfault (also see their other panels and webinars).

Memfault’s Slack Channel and Interrupt Blog are both excellent resources for embedded information of all kinds.

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Kari Love joined us to talk about soft robotics, robots in religion, and squishiness.

Kari co-authored Soft Robotics: A DIY Introduction to Squishy, Stretchy, and Flexible Robots. Her website is karimakes.com. She was previously on Embedded 189: The Squishiness Factor

One of the pneumatic drives that we mentioned was a Hackaday Prize Winner: FlowIO. Another was the Soft Robotics Toolkit. However, Kari recommended Amitabh Shrivastava’s Programmable Air (Crowd Supply page for Programmable Air).

Some search terms for getting started with soft robotics: “DIY Jamming gripper”,  “Positive pressure gripper”, and “bendy straw robot joints”. (That last one leads you to the delightful video Make a Robotic Hand with Straws.)

Polysense conductive dye for making sensors out of found objects. (On Hackaday.)

Simulation of Soft Bodies in Real World Applications (for squish and stretch) include SOFA, Abaqus, and DiffPD.

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An incomplete list of power systems people have used for generating soft robotic motion:

• Pneumatic - air and vacuum

• Hydraulic - using liquid

• Electrical - using currents

• Thermal - using temperatures

• Cable control - using motor control

• Magnetic - using magnets

• Chemical - using reactions

• Photonic - using light

• Biological - using living cells

• Hybrid systems - multiple sources in tandem

   

An incomplete list of things people have used to make soft robots:

• Fabric

• Silicone or other rubbers

• Flexible plastic

• Plastic films

• Metallic films

• Paper

• Carbon fiber

• Silly Putty

• Shape-changing alloys

• Electroactive polymers

• Liquid metals

• Gelatin or Gluten

• Cell tissue

   

Chris and Elecia talk about internetting your thing, motivating yourself with cheese, a pile of scrabble letters, an electric ouija board, and a supervillain origin story.

Elecia will be on a Memfault Panel on June 1, 2023: From Concept to Launch: What It Takes to Build and Ship a New Device 

Elecia was on Alpenglow’s Industries Solder Sesh #60 with Carrie Sundra. See the highlights (or the whole thing) on YouTube.

Chris has been working on building a baritone ukulele from a StewMac kit.

The conversation about uninteresting projects reminded Elecia of one of her favorite blog posts: Resilience Is a Skill 

Classpert will be offering a self-paced version of Elecia’s Making Embedded Systems course. Sign up on Classpert to be notified about the details.

The O’Reilly Learning System will have the first looks of the second edition of Making Embedded Systems. The full book should be out in the fall.

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Carl Bugeja makes actuators out of PCBs, puts them to work flapping origami bird wings (or moving robot rovers), and takes videos of the whole process. Oh, and get this, self-soldering circuits. 

First, origami: flap actuators video. Your source for the PCB actuators: flexar.io

Carl’s YouTube channel is filled with hardware, software, successes, and misses. Check out his tiny foldable rover and the self-soldering circuit. His projects are open source so you can find the information on github.com/CarlBugeja

Carl has a site (carlbugeja.com) and shows his projects on Instagram instagram.com/carl_bugeja

Elecia worked on a zero-heat-flux, deep tissue temperature measurement system.

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We spoke with Chris Gammell about IoT, podcasting, relaxing, and learning. Chris works at Golioth.io. They have a neat blog that talks about reference designs, Zephyr RTOS, and making products.

We talked about ESP chips which are made by Espressif. The ESP32 line is RISC-V.

Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP)

Some YouTube channels we discussed:

• Wendover Productions: explaining stuff

• CGP Grey, especially the recent one about vexillogy and US state flags

• Blacktail Studio: Soothing woodworking

• Adam Neely: music theory

• Shawn Hymel on Digikey’s channel explaining continuous integration and delivery: Intro to CI/CD

• The H note in music

Want to know more about self-paced Making Embedded Systems? Sign up for the waitlist at Classpert. Want to learn electronics? Check out Chris Gammell’s Contextual Electronics.

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Chris and Elecia talk about ChatGPT, conferences, online compilers, and Ardupilot.

Compiler Explorer: godbolt.org (and function pointer example)

Jupyter Notebooks with colab: colab.research.google.com/ (and one of Elecia’s origami pattern generator collabs)

Sign up for the Embedded newsletter! Support us on Patreon.

Conferences and happenings:

• Hackaday Prize

• Embedded Online Conference : late April, online

• Open Hardware Summit 2023: end of April in NYC, NY

• Teardown 2023 | Crowd Supply: late June in Portland, OR

• SEMICON West: July in San Francisco, CA 

• embedded world North America: October 2024, Austin, TX

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We spoke with Charlyn Gonda about making things glow, dealing with imposter syndrome, and using origami.

Charlyn’s website is charlyn.codes, the projects we talked about are documented there. You can find her on Instagram (@chardane) and Mastodon (https://leds.social/@charlyn).

Adafruit came up a lot in this episode. 

• NeoPixel Jewel

• DotStar High Density 8x8 Grid

• SAMD21 QT Py and RP2040 QT Py

• Adafruit IO 

Jason Koon’s Fibonacci displays are mesmerizing. Check them out on Jason’s website www.evilgeniuslabs.org or acquire them on Tindie. It can be controlled with the Pixelblaze.

Sonobe modules in origami

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Peter Griffin spoke with us about operant boxes, juggling many projects, getting into embedded systems, and bottle rockets. 

When we talked about 3D printing, Peter mentioned the Maker Muse Clearance and Tolerance 3D Printer Gauge.

The book we mentioned was Hot Seat by Dan Shapiro (Embedded 125: I Like Cheat Codes).

Peter on Github

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Please note that Peter Griffin spoke with Embedded.fm as an individual and not as representative of Slalom Consulting or any other organization.  All views, thoughts, and opinions expressed are his own and not necessarily those of his employer or any other organization.

Chris and Elecia talk about photons, comets, patterns, other flying objects, and cameras.

Chris uses PixInsight for processing  and has an Ioptron Sky Tracker. Apologies to our southern hemisphere listeners because Polaris is not visible there. There are (of course) other ways to align and even in the northern hemisphere more modern trackers don’t necessarily need Polaris.

Star Exterminator: who cares what it does it has an awesome name. Though it does what it says (on photos, no real stars were harmed in the making of this podcast).

Jupyter Notebooks on a Circuit Python board.

Elecia’s Yoshimura sine pattern generating Python colab. Also, Rigidly foldable origami gadgets and tessellations is an excellent article about Miura-ori and other rigidly foldable patterns. You can see her patterns over on Instagram. (You can see some of Chris’ photos on his Instagram.)

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Adafruit’s Liz Clark (BlitzCityDIY) spoke with us about MIDI, music, and tutorials. 

Liz’s Adafruit Tutorials include

• MIDI for Makers

• CircuitPython Trombone Champ Controller

• Mini LED Matrix Audio Visualizer 

• CircuitPython MIDI to CV Skull

Liz sometimes hosts the Adafruit Show and Tell which is Wednesdays 7:30pm ET. Speaking of Adafruit videos, we mentioned the Fusion 360 tutorial on Snap Fit Cases.

Liz’s BlitzCityDIY YouTube channel shows her building instruments including her mentioned Melody Maker. She also has many 3D printables and github repositories under github.com/BlitzCityDIY

Christopher notes that there are browser extensions that allow a person to stop auto-playing GIFs.

VCVRack is a Eurorack simulator for synthesizer modules.

Sadly, Mutable Instruments has shut down.

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Chris and Elecia talk with Mark Smith (aka SmittyHalibut and N6MTS) about amateur radio, interconnect standards, and podcasting.

Mark is a host of the Ham Radio Workbench podcast. His company is Halibut Electronics (electronics.halibut.com). He’s been working on Open Headset Interconnect Standard and Satellite Optimized Amateur Radio (SOAR).

Find Mark as SmittyHalibut on YouTube, github, and Mastodon.

Chris talked about getting into WSPR in 197: Smell the Transistor but we first talked about it in 76: Entropy is For Wimps

Chris has spec’d out his intended project at QRP Labs, the QCX+ 5W CW Mini.

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Chris and Elecia talk to Jeff Gable and Luca Ingianni of the Agile Embedded podcast, discussing the definition of Agile, agreeing about some things, and disagreeing about others.

Agile Embedded can be found in your usual podcast locations or get it from the source: https://agileembeddedpodcast.com/

Jeff’s website is jeffgable.com and Luca’s is luca.engineer

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Chris and Elecia talk about house maintenance, blinking LEDs, paper engineering and more. 

Cutting Mobius Strips Video: Tadashi Tokieda cuts various combinations of loops and Mobius loops - with surprising results.

festi.info/boxes.py generates boxes for laser cutting (or other SVG consuming device). Boxes.py is a python module that lets you programmatically generate the SVGs. (Github repo)

Amanda Ghassaei’s Sugarcube is a MIDI instrument using this SparkFun button pad. We also talked about the Mikroe 8800 Retro Click.

Elecia is taking Paper Engineering with Kelli Anderson. Chris is taking songwriting courses from School of Song.

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We talked with John Taylor about his book, how to handle data, and the open/closed principle of software development.

John’s book is Patterns in the Machine. It was mentioned on Embedded Artistry and is part of their Design for Change course.

John also has a blog (PatternsInTheMachine.net) and a github repo that is a companion to his book, showing the PIM framework.

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Daniel Situnayake joined us to talk about AI, embedded systems, his new book on the previously mentioned topics, and writing technical books. 

Daniel’s book is AI at the Edge: Solving Real-World Problems with Embedded Machine Learning from O’Reilly Media.

He is also the Head of Machine Learning at Edge Impulse, which makes machine learning on embedded devices simpler. They have a Responsible AI License which aims to keep our robot overlords from being too evil.

We mentioned AI Dungeon as an amusing D&D style adventure with an AI. We also talked about ChatGPT.

Daniel was previously on the show, Episode 327: A Little Bit of Human Knowledge, shortly after his first book came out: TinyML: Machine Learning with TensorFlow Lite on Arduino and Ultra-Low-Power Microcontrollers

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Chris Svec joined us to talk about kids programming and how well the Joel Test has held up.

Svec’s son (“The Kid”) developed an interest in programming by playing games. Most of his programming desires are around building games of his own. 

Any time we talk about kids and programming, Scratch comes up. It really is that neat and is The Kid approved. Some resources to get you started (actually, getting started is easy, you may want a book to do more than the basics):

• The Everything Kids' Scratch Coding Book: Learn to Code and Create Your Own Cool Games! by Jason Rukman 

• Scratch 3 Programming Playground: Learn to Program by Making Cool Games by Al Sweigart (hey, we know that guy!)

• griffpatch on YouTube 

Digipen.edu had two courses The Kid (and Svec) took. Both are free on YouTube:

• Introduction to Game Design Lessons

• DigiPen Basic Game Development Series

Finally, in a shockingly unrelated twist, we talked about the Joel Test for determining the health of a software development organization. No determination was made on how good The Kid finds his current position.

Transcript

Chris and Elecia take an in-studio vacation, chatting about what they’ve been doing. A few technical topics came up, entirely unintentionally.

Shirts are on sale

James Webb Space Telescope Pop-Up Card

Spicy Honey

Github Codespaces lets you try out some code bases 

Some quirks of C

How do breakpoints even work? (via Memfault’s Interrupt)

Transcript

Thea Flowers creates open source and open hardware craft synthesizers that use Circuit Python for customization. She also writes about the internals of the SAMD21.

Thea’s synthesizer modules are found at Winterbloom, including Castor & Pollux and the Big Honking Button. It is all open source hardware so you can find code and schematics on Thea’s github site: github.com/theacodes 

Thea’s site is thea.codes. You can find her blog there with deeply technical and detailed posts such as The most thoroughly commented linker script (probably), The Design of the Roland Juno oscillators, and Understanding the SAMD21 Clocks. She’s on Twitter as Stargirl, @theavalkyrie.

For more information about the Eurorack, listen to Embedded 356: Deceive and Manipulate You with Leonardo Laguna Ruiz of Vult.

Sarah Withee spoke with us about using an artificial pancreas, learning many programming languages, and FIRST robotics.

More about the Open Artificial Pancreas System can be found at OpenAPS.org or in their documentation. Some other pieces we talked about include:

• LoopKit: an automated insulin delivery app template for iOS github (some additional docs)

• AndroidAPS github (additional docs)

• Reilly Link is the communication method for some insulin pumps

• Orange Link is a Reilly Link compatible device to run OpenAPS

 To get involved with FIRST robotics, the place to start is FIRSTInspires.org

Sarah’s website is GeekyGirlSarah.com. Her programming language comparison tool is Code Thesaurus: codethesaur.us/

If you want to see small algorithms written in different languages, check out Rosetta Code

Transcript

Michael Gielda spoke with us about Renode, an open source embedded systems simulator. It also simulates large distributed systems and network communications. 

Check out Renode.io and the boards supported by Renode and Zephyr on Renodepedia. Elecia played with the Nucleo F401 tutorial on colab.

Michael is the co-founder of Antmicro.

The ESP32-C3 is a commercial RISC-V core with WiFi and BLE.

We also mentioned Wokwi on the show. (And we had its creator Uri Shaked as a guest on episode 396: Untangle the Mess

Transcript

Martha Wells is a science fiction and fantasy author. She spoke with us about her books (including Murderbot Diaries!), writing, and creating fantastical worlds.

Marth (@marthawells1) has won Nebula, Hugo, and Locus Awards for her work. We mostly talked about the Murderbot Diaries and the Books of the Raksura. Oh, and the Star Wars tie-in about Leia, Razor's Edge. And The Witch King is coming out next year, a brand new world. Heck, just look at her full catalog. Martha also has a blog and a website.

As often happens when book dragons get together, we talked about our hoards. Some books and authors that came up:

• Red Scholar’s Wake by Aliette de Bodard 

• The Spare Man by Mary Robinette Kowal 

• Ian Halle

• Ancillary Justice trilogy by Ann Leckie

• Phyllis Gotlieb (Wikipedia)

• Andre Norton (Wikipedia)

• Zenna Henderson (Wikipedia)

• The Vorkosigan Saga by Lois McMaster Bujold (we didn’t like the new covers as much as the old but the books are great either way)

Tor.com is a fantastic site with lots of free fiction. Murderbot started there and has a few short stories that are otherwise hard to find.

There is a rare and sold out Subterranean Press edition of the Murderbot Diaries with illustrations from Tommy Arnold. See some of the illustrations.

Transcript

Jasper van Woudenberg spoke with us about hacking hardware, writing a technical book, and ethics.

The Hardware Hacking Handbook was written by Jasper and Colin O’Flynn (ChipWhisperer and episode 286: Twenty Cans of Gas). The site related to the book is hardwarehacking.io, you don’t need the book to play with some of the examples.

Jasper (@jzvw) is also the CTO of Riscure North America, a company that specializes in hardware security. They are hiring.  

Transcript

Chris and Elecia bounce from topic to topic, discussing life and work and occasionally answering listener emails.

Python can format code into equations in Latex with Latexify (as noted in this tweet) 

Interesting sensor: Sensing deep-tissue physiology via wearable ultrasonic phased arrays  

Turing Complete - a listener-recommended logic gate puzzle game for Steam. In the past, we’ve also talked about Zachtronics’ TIS-100 which is similar and Shenzhen IO which is at the circuit level. Oh, and there is The Human Resource Machine by Tomorrow Corporation.

A listener recommended the Agile Embedded Podcast, particularly the episode on technical debt.

News that Rollercoasters are triggering iPhone 14 and Apple Watch Crash Detection led to a mentions of a blog post about debugging Fitbit’s issues with rollercoasters and accelerometers.

Visual Studio Code for embedded systems development:

• You can use CubeMX and Platform.io (here is a how-to)

• Try out this stm32-for-vscode extension that claims to do what you want (we haven’t tried it, tell us if it works) 

• Or you can go more directly with the cortex-debug extension and locally installed ARM GCC package.

Don’t forget the VSCode Code Spell Checker extension.

From the notes for Elecia’s class:

Where to buy small quantity prototyping components

Having looked for an OLED display part in Live Class, I wanted to put together a list of where you might want to look for components, especially for the prototype stage. 

• Adafruit and Sparkfun (and EMSL and a lot of other maker stores). If you are using their code as template or test code, look for their boards to see if you can use them.

• Worldwide and large components distributors with local distribution:

  • Digikey is worldwide and they resell Adafruit and Sparkfun so if you don’t want to start with an “OLED” search on Digikey and sort through the results, well, you can start with easier prototype parts.

  • Farnell is a UK company though they have other names in other locations (Newark in the US and Element14 in Asia and Oceania). If they have your flag, you can probably get cheap shipping. Farnell is usually good for all of Europe.

  • RS Components is also new to me though they seem to stock Adafruit parts as well as general electronics. They have lots of distributors all over the world (including more in Africa than I usually see).

  • AliExpress is huge and worldwide, shipping from Asia. It is hard to find things but searching “Adafruit [part]” or “Sparkfun [part]” and you might find what you want… or a cheaper knockoff. Usually you want results in the Electronic Components and Supplies. Note: if it seems too good to be true it probably is.

• UK has Pimoroni and Cool Components and OkDo resell Adafruit and Sparkfun as well as other pieces like BBC micro:bit and Raspberry Pi. These may work for European countries.

• Seeed Studio has a wide variety of parts, the Grove and Components categories have parts that might be interesting. They deliver quickly and cheaply to Oceania and Asia. 

• DFRobot is new to me but looks great. It was recommended for folks in Asia and Oceania. Their parts are resold through Digikey, Arrow, Farnell (Newark).  

• Australia: Little Bird Electronics, Core Electronics, and Altronics

Transcript

Thank you to our sponsor this week!

We were joined in the studio by the Evil Mad Scientists Lenore Edman and Windell Oskay.

Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories (@EMSL) produces the disintegrated 555 Timer kit and 741 Op-Amp  kit. These were made in conjunction with Eric Schlaepfer, who also created the Monster 6502. 

EMSL also makes the Eggbot kit and AxiDraw not-kit (and mini-kit). For a history of the pen plotter, check out Sher Minn’s Plotter People talk on YouTube.

(They have too many neat things to list here, go look on their page: https://shop.evilmadscientist.com/directory. Or stop into their Sunnyvale, California shop.)

We talked about the beauty of boards including Kong Money and ElectroCookie’s candy colored shields and Arduino Leonardo.

Jepson Herbarium has interesting workshops including one about seaweed. At one workshop, Lenore and Windell got to talk to Josie Iselin, author of The Curious World of Seaweed. 

Elecia enjoyed Slime: How Algae Created Us, Plague Us, and Just Might Save Us by Ruth Kassinger.

Windell was previously on Embedded episode #124: Please Don’t Light Yourself on Fire, we mainly talked about the book he co-authored: The Annotated Build-It-Yourself Science Laboratory.

Lenore was previously on Embedded episode #40: Mwahaha Session, we talked about EMSL.

Our post-show tidepooling was very successful with a variety of nudibranchs, shrimp, seaweed, sea birds, snails, and hermit crabs.

We spoke with Duncan Haldane about creating hardware schematics by writing software code, three dimensional circuits, and bio-inspired jumping robots.  

Duncan is the CEO of JitX (jitx.com). They recently received Series A funding and are currently hiring engineers. Please mention that you heard about JitX here on Embedded.

While earning a PhD at UC Berkeley, Duncan (@DuncanHaldane) also worked on Salto (video) and OpenRoach (github).

Transcript

Jonathan Beri spoke with us about the different IoT development tools and how to categorize them. 

Jonathan (@beriberikix) is the CEO of Golioth (@golioth_iot). He wrote a blog post called An Introduction to The Five Clouds of IoT, breaking the clouds into individual clouds: device, connectivity, data, application, and development.

Jonathan was previously on Embedded 222: Virtual Bunnie when he worked for Particle.io.

A partial list of the IoT tools we mentioned:

• ThingsBoard

• Freeboard

• Grafana

• Ubidots 

• Renode

• Memfault

• Golioth

• Particle.io 

• Node-RED

• Soracom

• Hologram.io  

See also A list of IoT platforms – Systev post mentioned in the show (also Building The Infinite Matrix Of Tamagotchis | Hackaday).

Transcript

Elizabeth Wharton spoke to us about laws, computers, cybersecurity, and funding education in rural communities. She is a strong proponent of privacy by design and de-identification by default.

Liz (@LawyerLiz) is the VP of Operations at Scythe.io (@scythe_io), a company that works in cybersecurity. She won the Cybersecurity or Privacy Woman Law Professional of the Year for 2022 at DefCon.

Liz is on the advisory board of the Rural Tech Fund (@ruraltechfund) which strives to reduce the digital divide between rural and urban areas.

We mentioned disclose.io and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA, wiki).

Transcript

Elecia and Chris are back from vacation and catching up! Today’s topics include: last week’s burnout episode and what we learned, what is a PSoC and why would you want one, how to get up to speed as a junior engineer, and a few more side quests.

The burnout episode with Keith Hildesheim was last week, we encourage you to check it out, we learned some things about ourselves and maybe you will too.

Chris mentioned astrophotography and here’s the link to the reddit post that inspires him to keep going: astrounding Jupiter video.

In case you missed it in the newsletter, which you should definitely sign up for, here’s Chris’ list of VSCode extensions:

• AutoScroll - Have a log file open that you're monitoring? This extension keeps the tab scrolled to the bottom at all times.

• Doxygen Documentation Generator - Quickly generate and pre-fill those tedious doxygen style comments.

• GitHub Pull Requests and Issues - Make pull-requests or do reviews for Github right in the editor.

• GitLens - Easily see revision history and "blame" for every line of code in a pretty unobtrusive way.

• Header source switch - Ever want to switch really quickly to a C file's header (or vice versa)? This adds a keyboard shortcut to do just that.

• TODO Highlight - Makes those millions of TODOs and FIXMEs light up in a nice neon color so you can't ignore them anymore.

Transcript

Keith Hildesheim joined us in an excellent conversation about avoiding burnout at work (and dealing with the aftereffects). 

Keith mentioned some useful books and articles:

• Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle

• Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

• SCARF Model

• Burnout Is About Your Workplace, Not Your People

• 5 Ways to Boost Your Resilience at Work

• How to Make Stress Your Friend

• Growth Mindset vs. Fixed

• Mindfulness Exercises

• 3 Ways to Recharge When You're Burned Out.

Transcript

Keith also sent over a few charts and checklists which you can see on the website episode notes.

Mike Harrison challenged us to a PIC fight on twitter. Surprisingly, no blood was shed and we mostly talked about LEDs and art installations.

Mike’s YouTube Channel and his website electricstuff.co.uk. He's on twitter as @mikelectricstuf.  Here's a link to what prompted the show: PIC fight on Twitter.

His professional hire-him-to-work-on-your-neat-stuff site is whitewing.co.uk

For driving LEDs, Mike likes the TI TLC5971: 12-Channel, 16-Bit ES-PWM RGB LED Driver with 3.3V Linear Regulator.

Gustavo Pezzi spoke with us about using fun and simple systems to explain low-level concepts and how they work in higher-level engineering tasks. For example, teaching microprocessor concepts using Atari 2600 assembly and physics by creating a simple game engine.

Gustavo’s site is Pikuma.com. He has a free taster course on bit-shifting. We also talked about Atari 2600 Programming with 6502 Assembly and Physics Game Engine Programming. 

Stella, a multi-platform Atari 2600 emulator

For examples of optimizing in different ways, check out this bit hacks page.

Gustavo is mentoring for Classpert’s Building a Language course. (This is where Elecia teaches Making Embedded Systems.)

The conjecture about a shortage of  electrical engineers was from The Register.

Transcript

Phillip Johnston joined us to talk about how engineering approaches can change over time. 

This conversation started with Phillip’s Embedded Artistry blog post How Our Approach to Abstract Interfaces Has Changed Over the Years. His new course is Designing Embedded Software for Change. 

Embedded Artistry has a Design Pattern Catalogue (though Elecia was looking at Software design patterns on Wikipedia during the podcast). https://github.com/embvm 

Phillip is working with Memfault on an ongoing embedded systems panel. The first topic they covered was observability metrics for IoT devices. There is a panel coming up on how to debug embedded devices in production.

Some reading that Phillip mentioned:

• Toward a New Model of Abstraction in Software Engineering by Gregor Kiczales

• A Procedure for Designing Abstract Interfaces for Device Interface Modules by Kathryn Heninger Britton, R. Alan Parker, David L. Parnas

• Designing Software for Ease of Extension and Contraction by  David L. Parnas (1979)

• Design Patterns for Embedded Systems in C: An Embedded Software Engineering Toolkit by Bruce Powel Douglass

• Best Paper Awards in Computer Science from Jeff Huang 

Creating a Circular Buffer in C and C++ - Embedded Artistry

Aardvark I2C/SPI Host Adapter - Total Phase 

Transcript

Chris and Elecia chat about origami, learning, whether to future proof tools or buy the cheaper option, simulators, and classes.

Elecia is gearing up to teach another Making Embedded Systems course. Sign up if you want to be in the Yellow Seahorses cohort! Sign up early and often. Sign up other people. Ask other people to sign themselves up and even more other people. Well, you get the idea.

Check out Wokwi! While it looks like it is for Arduino from the front page, there is a lot of work going on to support C/C++ APIs such as the one for Raspberry Pi Pico or the Rust one for the ESP32. Please ask a professor what they’d need to use Wokwi in their class!

In episode 158: Programming Is Too Difficult for Humans, we talked about the Ada language and using it on ARM cores. Learn Ada (at AdaCore).

News

• Dead spiders are coming soon to a robot near you

• Continuous ultrasounds: probably not for swimming 

• Is CERN opening a portal to hell? Scientists claim not.

   

Transcript

Thank you to our sponsor this week!

Chris Hobbs talks with Elecia about safety critical systems. Safety-critical systems keep humans alive. Writing software for these embedded systems carries a heavy responsibility. Engineers need to understand how to make code fail safely and how to reduce risks through good design and careful development. 

The book discussed was Embedded Software Development for Safety-Critical Systems by Chris Hobbs.

This discussion was originally for Classpert (where Elecia is teaching her Making Embedded Systems course) and the video is on Classpert’s YouTube if you want to see faces.

There were many terms with letters and numbers, here is a guide:

• IEC 61508: Functional Safety of Electrical/Electronic/Programmable Electronic Safety-related Systems; relates to industrial systems and forms the foundation for many other standards 

• ISO 26262: Road vehicles - Functional Safety; extends and specializes IEC 61508 for systems within cards

• IEC 62304 specifies life cycle requirements for the development of medical software and software within medical devices. It has been adopted as national standards and therefore can be used as a benchmark to comply with regulatory requirements.

• MISRA C: a set of software development guidelines for the C programming language 

• DO178-C and DO178-B: Software Considerations in Airborne Systems and Equipment Certification are the primary documents by which the certification authorities such as FAA, EASA and Transport Canada approve all commercial software-based aerospace systems

• ISO/IEC 29119: Software and systems engineering -- Software testing

• ISO 14971:2019 Medical devices — Application of risk management to medical devices

• IEC 62304:2006 Medical device software — Software life cycle processes

Transcript

Dan White, CEO of Filament Games, spoke to us about educational games, how to make play part of learning, and simulating robots. We also discussed what makes a good (or bad) learning experience, the limits of games as educational tools, and the elements of fun.

Roblox is a game platform and game creation system. Filament Games is developing a robot simulator called Roboco.

Filament has many games out in the wild, check out their portfolio. If this sounds like fun, check out their careers page.

Durf live streams game playing

Transcript

Mohit Bhoite makes functional electronic sculptures from components and brass wire. We spoke with him on the hows and whys of making art.

Mohit’s sculptures, including the Tie Fighter. More on his instagram: mohitbhoite

Jiri Prause has a wonderful tutorial on how to make simpler freeform electronics on Instructables.

Peter Vogel is another artist making phenomenal freeform electronics.

Leonardo Ulian uses electronic components in his art (his don’t function but wow).

Advice from Mohit on trying this yourself from Bantam Tools. Mohit likes Xuron Pliers

Mohit can be found on twitter as @MohitBhoite

Eric Schlaepfer and Windell Oskay are the authors of Open Circuits: The Inner Beauty of Electronic Components. We discussed the inner beauty of a number of electronic components as well as cameras, photography, writing, preparing samples, and terrible title puns.

You can pre-order the physical book and get a digital early release copy at NoStarch.com/Open-Circuits

Windell is co-founder of Evil Mad Scientist Laboratory (@EMSL). He and Eric have collaborated before on several projects:

• The Three Fives Kit: A Discrete 555 Timer 

• The 555SE Discrete 555 Timer

• The XL741 Discrete Op-Amp Kit

• The 741SE Discrete 741 Op-Amp

Eric is also known for the Monster 6502, a 6502 processor made up of individual transistors. Eric also writes on tubetime.us and is on Twitter as @TubeTimeUS

Sign up for the Embedded newsletter by the end of July and be entered to win one of these lovely prizes:

• The Three Fives Kit: A Discrete 555 Timer (two)

• A copy of Open Circuits (one)

Transcript

A lovely reject from the book, this is the base of a neon bulb from GE.

Chris and Elecia question embedded systems then answer listener questions about embedded systems. They mostly agree except about one thing which, after some discussion, they agree upon. Mostly.

Video of Cissy Strut cover where Chris plays all of the instruments

Video where Elecia shows off some programmatic origami and simulation (not discussed but it seemed reasonable retaliation for talking about Chris’ video)

Dynamic Linker for Cortex-M (github repo)

Transcript

Alexandra Covor spoke with us about engineering, making, drawing, school, and what it means to be an artist. 

Alex’s projects are on GitHub and Hackster.io. Her electronics comics can be found as PikaComics on Instagram.

The 2022 Open Hardware Summit named Alex as part of the Ada Lovelace Fellowship. Her favorite talk from the summit was Anuradha Reddy talking about Knotty (Naughty) Hardware.

Alex works for Zalmotek, a design services firm in Bucharest. We talked about Waylay.io, including their smart pet feeder built on that platform. For example projects for Edge Impulse, they built a tools organizer that uses ML.

Transcript

John Catsoulis is the founder of Udamonic and creator of the Forth-based Scamp development board. He spoke with us about Forth, electrical engineering, and writing a technical book.

Find out more about Udamonic’s Scamp at udamonic.com. There are some hardware projects under the Create menu.

The Forth programming language is famous for its small size, portability, and post-fix (RPN) nature. 

John wrote O’Reilly’s Designing Embedded Hardware. While some parts are out of date, the general theory is still good.

CuriousMarc’s YouTube channel is full of retro-computer goodness.

Long ago, Elecia read The Eudaemonic Pie and imagined a life of high tech crime. Please don’t tell her if it doesn’t hold up well.

Transcript

Lead Solution Architect at Cymotive, Benny Meisels spoke with us about implementing embedded software security in cars. The discussion touches ECUs, IoT vehicles, threat and risk analysis, and how reverse engineering plays a role in security testing.

Benny works at Cymotive (https://www.cymotive.com/). You can find him on LinkedIn benny-meisels or on Twitter @benny_meisels.

Resources for automotive security:

• Automotive Security Research Group (ASRG)

• Upstream Security

• Hacking a VW Golf Power Steering ECU - Part 1 – Willem Melshing's Blog 

• Instrument Cluster (ICM) Simulator: ICSim on github

• Program | escar USA conference | Embedded Security in Cars

• Car in a box, also on github and Arduino based: A lower cost approximation of the Toyota PASTA:Portable Automotive Testbed with Adaptability 

• Ghost Peak: Practical Distance Reduction Attacks Against HRP UWB Ranging

Framework Laptop 

Transcript

Laura Abbott of Oxide Computing spoke with us about a silicon bug in the ROM of the NXP LPC55, affecting the TrustZone. 

More information about the two issues are in the Oxide blog:

• Another vulnerability in the LPC55S69 ROM

• Exploiting Undocumented Hardware Blocks in the LPC55S69 

More about LPC55S6x and their LPC55Sxx Secure Boot

Ghidra is a software reverse engineering framework… and it is one of the NSA’s github repositories.

Laura will also be speaking about this at Hardwear.io in early June 2022 in Santa Clara. 

Twitter handles: @hardwear_io, @oxidecomputer, @openlabbott,

The vulnerability was filed with NIST: NVD - CVE-2021-31532

Transcript

Chris and Elecia chat about practice, software quality, and empathy for seemingly unmotivated team members. 

Elecia is teaching another cohort of Making Embedded Systems in the fall, starting late August. There will be reminders between now and then but if you want to sign up, here is the page. The funny and odd music instruction video with the copy-and-paste method of composition.

Sign up for the newsletter!

Support us on Patreon!

Transcript

Tom Anderson returned to the show to describe how transistors and passives work. We discuss everything from vacuum tubes to diodes to transistors (PNP and NPN) to resistors and capacitors. We search for synonyms among the confusing terminology of cathodes, plates, emitters, anodes, grids, bases, and collectors. 

This was a tech heavy episode so little bit of brushing up on terms may be useful before (or after):

• Boltzmann constant

• Physical constant

• Vacuum tube

• Diode logic

• Diode 

• Push–pull converter

Transcript.

Ethan Slattery joined us to talk about animals, animal trackers, and how they work.

Ethan works for Wildlife Computers. They use the Argos Network for data transfer. He was previously at MBARI and worked with Engineers for Exploration as an undergraduate.

Ethan is also known as CrustyAuklet on Twitter and Github. He also has an Instagram page. 

Things mentioned in the show you might want to know more about:

• Nautilus Live is a streaming YouTube channel from an ROV exploring the oceans. They have periodic dives where you can ask scientists about what they are seeing, while they are seeing it. Watch discoveries happen in real-time. Or watch the highlight reels on YouTube.

• Ze Frank also has a YouTube channel about animals called True Facts that it is … not as scientifically minded. And sometimes NSFW. Start with the True Facts about the Ocotupus.  (Note he did a parody of a Nautilus Live dive). 

• The Genius of Birds by Jennifer Ackerman

• Penguin, pangolin, whale shark, weta, you might have heard about those but what about the cassowary? In-depth documentary video, people on the internet are idiots video, and Wikipedia.

Transcript

Amanda “w0z” Wozniak spoke with us about her career through biomedical engineering and startups. 

Amanda contributed a chapter to Building Open Source Hardware: DIY Manufacturing. (A book we spoke with Alicia Gibb about in #289.) Amanda’s chapter was titled Design Process: How to Get from Nothing to Something.

For more information about the companies we discussed, check out Amanda’s LinkedIn page. 

Chris and Elecia chat about tools, interrupts, and general happenings. 

Thank you to Newark for supporting the show! The part that was not guessed was an RF FET: MRF1K50HR5.

Elecia found MCU on Eclipse (Eric Styger)’s tutorials on Visual Studio Code for C/C++ with ARM Cortex-M (Part 1).

Embedded has a Patreon page where you can get access to the Slack group. The book club is starting Prototype to Product: A Practical Guide for Getting to Market by Alan Cohen.

Wokwi Raspberry Pi Pico projects from Elecia: Command Line Interface and PWM Experiments with Logic Analyzer

Phillip Johnston of Embedded Artistry and Tyler Hoffman from Memfault are kicking off a quarterly embedded discussion panel. This month is about building embedded systems at scale using device metrics: Embedded Device Observability Metrics Panel 

Jonathan Beri from Golioth created instructions on how to use USB from WSL2.

Copy-editing game.

Transcript.

Thank you to Newark for sponsoring this episode of Embedded!

Dr. Shirley Davis spoke with us about her book: Diversity, Equity & Inclusion For Dummies.

Dr. Davis is a speaker and consultant on diversity, equity, and inclusion topics; her website is drshirleydavis.com. 

Dr. Davis’ books include:

• Diversity, Equity & Inclusion For Dummies

• Living Beyond “What If?”: Release the Limits and Realize Your Dreams

• The Seat: How to Get Invited to the Table When You're Over-Performing but Undervalued 

• Reinvent Yourself: Strategies for Achieving Success in Every Area of Your Life

Transcript

This week we talk about CircuitPython with Adafruit's Kattni Rembor and Scott Shawcroft.

The suggested first board is CircuitPlayground Express with LEDs, sensors, and buttons. CircuitPython is also available for many other boards including the BLE Feather (NRF52832).

For a basic introduction take a look at What is CircuitPython and see some example scripts. To dig a little deeper, check out the many resources in Awesome CircuitPython. The whole thing is open source so you can see their code. If you are thinking about contributing (or just want some fun chats), get in touch on the CircuitPython channel of the Adafruit Discord server: adafru.it/discord

Many of the language’s design choices favor ease-of-use over ready-for-production. Imagine teaching an intro to programming class without worrying what computers will be used or how to get compilers installed on everyone’s machines before time runs out. 

One final note: Kattni did a project that gave us the show title: Piano in the Key of Lime. After we finished recording, Chris asked her why she didn’t add a kiwi fruit to her mix… Kattni explained she had limes and they were small. Chris only wanted a different fruit so she could rename it Piano in the Kiwi of Lime. It is always sad when we stop recording too early.

Machine learning engineer and science fiction author S. B. Divya joined us to talk about artificial intelligence, robotics, and humanity.

Divya’s first full-length book is Machinehood which has been nominated for a Nebula (as was her novella Runtime).

You can find more about Divya on her website (sbdivya.com) or on her Wikipedia page.

Divya also co-hosted EscapePod, a podcast of science fiction stories. 

Transcript

Mihir Shah of Royal Circuits joined us to talk about how PCBs are fabricated and how companies are funded. Mihir was CEO of InspectAR before they were acquired by Cadence.

Mihir works for Royal Circuits and runs a newsletter called TheAnalog.io

We talked about InspectAR on Embedded 384: What Is a Board File? with Liam Cadigan.

Transcript for this show

This episode is sponsored by Newark, a leading international distributor of industrial and electronic components. From design and testing to production and maintenance, discover why so many choose to partner with Newark!

Jorvon Moss (Odd Jayy) joined us to talk about making robots, steampunk aesthetics, uploading consciousness to AIs, and the importance of drawing.

You can find Jay on Twitter (@Odd_Jayy) and Instagram (@odd_jayy). He’s been moving his Hackster projects over to Digikey’s Maker.io space: www.digikey.com/en/maker. Jay’s projects are collected here.

Elecia brought up the science fiction book Machinehood by S. B. Divya. Jay returned with Martha Well’s Murderbot Diaries.  

Jay mentioned Mycroft.ai, open source voice assistant. Jay was interviewed by Make Magazine (article). He was on the cover of the magazine; the YouTube video where he was informed was heartwarming.

Transcript

Chris and Elecia talk about burnout, a SPI + RTOS bug, newsletters, receiving feedback, Elecia’s class, and listener projects.

Elecia’s Making Embedded Systems course on Classpert is starting a new cohort on March 19th. She gave a live talk related to the class about looking beneath the surface of Arduino (YouTube version). She’s excited about the Wokwi Raspberry Pi Pico simulator with C.

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Chris Lott wrote a Hackaday article about episode 404: Uppercase A, Lowercase R M with Reinhard Keil.

Elecia enjoyed Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback by Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen.

Serial Wombat peripheral expander for Arduino will be on Kickstarter soon

Chris wanted machine readable datasheets, listener Nick responds with Cyanobyte on github.

Infineon (previously Cypress) PSoC (wiki) is a chip/FPGA thing. We talked with Patrick Kane about it in episode 32: Woo Woo Woo

Reinhard Keil joined us to talk about creating the Keil compiler, the 8051 processor, Arm’s CMSIS, and the new cloud-based Keil Studio IDE. 

MDK-Community is a new free-for-non-commercial use, not-code-size restricted version of the Keil compiler (+ everything else). 

CMSIS is a set of open source components for use with Arm processors. The signal processing and neural net components are optimized for speedy use. The SVD and DAP components are used by tool vendors so there may be components you care about more than others.

Keil Studio is Arm’s new cloud-based IDE with a debugger that connects to boards on your desk: keil.arm.com. Reinhard talks more about the advantages of cloud-based development in this white paper.

Arm Virtual Hardware has multiple integrations, the official product page is www.arm.com/virtual-hardware. The MDK integration and nifty examples are described in the press release.

Reinhard mentioned the Ethos-U65 processor for neural networks. 

The Dragon Book about compilers

Transcript

Shawn Hymel spoke to us about creating education videos and written tutorials; marketing by and for engineers; and bowties.

You can find Shawn teaching FPGAs, RTOSs and other interesting topics on Digikey’s YouTube channel. Shawn also has two embedded Machine Learning courses on Coursera (free!). 

Or start at his personal site: shawnhymel.com where you can find written tutorials like How to Set Up Raspberry Pi Pico C/C++ Toolchain on Windows with VS Code.

Shawn talked about Discovery-Driven Growth: A Breakthrough Process to Reduce Risk and Seize Opportunity by Rita Gunther McGrath and Ian C. Macmillan. He referenced  Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant by W. Chan Kim and Renée A. Mauborgne

Elecia enjoyed The Visual Mba: Two Years of Business School Packed into One Priceless Book of Pure Awesomeness by Jason Barron

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Transcript

Chris Svec of iRobot and Phillip Johnston of Embedded Artistry join Christopher and Elecia to talk about the hows and whys of estimating software schedules..

The article that started the discussion was Agile Otter’s Platitudes of Doom. 

You can participate in these sorts of discussions on the Embedded Slack Channel by supporting Embedded on Patreon. 

On Phillip’s Embedded Artistry Website you can find a library of courses, hundreds of free articles, and even more member's only content. Their current focus is developing two new courses: Designing Embedded Software for Change and Abstractions and Interfaces. There are also many great posts on planning and estimation.

Matthew Liberty shared good advice for lowering power. We talk about different ways to measure current (Matt has a nice write-up) and things software can do to decrease power consumption.

Sleeping is critical, of course, as is choosing your clock speed and setting the GPIOs to good states. Everything is fine until you start getting into the microamps, then your multimeter measurements may start to fail you. (EEvblog explains why in his uCurrent intro.)

Eventually, you may want to measure nanoamp sleep states along with amp-consuming wake states. Matt’s Joulescope is a tool to do just that (Kickstarter goes live Feb 19, 2019!), automatically moving between 9 orders of magnitude of dynamic range and graphing the results on your computer.

Matthew’s consulting company is JetPerch.

We mentioned Colin O’Flynn’s ChipWhisperer which uses differential power analysis for security attacks. We also talked about Jacob Beningo’s post on protecting your tools.

Find Matt on Twitter as @mliberty1.

Elecia is giving away a chapter of her O’Reilly book, Making Embedded Systems. It is Chapter 10: Reducing Power Consumption. Hit the contact link if you want a copy.

Miro Samek joins us to discuss designing systems, state machines, and teaching courses.

Miro’s company is Quantum Leaps (state-machine.com) which provides commercial licensing for QP Real-Time Embedded Frameworks.  It is an open source project, the code can be found on github: github.com/QuantumLeaps/qpc 

One of the key concepts is an Active Object which aids in real-time system development, especially in the areas of state machines and concurrency. 

Miro’s (amazing) Modern Embedded System Programming series can be found on his YouTube channel. 

You can also find Miro on Twitter: @mirosamek

Jen Costillo joined us to talk about voice acting, reverse engineering, podcasting, and dance.

Jen’s podcast is the Unnamed Reverse Engineering Podcast, found in all your usual podcast places. Jen and her co-host Alvaro were on an episode of Opposable Thumbs podcast.

Find Jen on Twitter at @RebelbotJen (also @unnamed_show and @catmachinesSF). Rebelbot.com has her blog and Cat Machines Dance is her site devoted to dance (including the mentioned video about dancers and the pandemic).

The Hardware Hacking Handbook: Breaking Embedded Security with Hardware Attacks by Jasper van Woudenberg and Colin O'Flynn 

Jen is studying voice-overs at VoicetraxSF 

Jen has been on the show many times in the past. Some of our favorites include

• 108: Nebarious about security and privacy

• 82: I Was a Chewbacca Person about movies that influenced their path to engineering

• 51: There Is No Crying in Strcpy about interviewing

• 25: Thunderdome for Antennas about RF and manufacturing consumer products

• 10: Hands Off, Baby about C keywords

Tom Anderson explains radio frequency electronics (RF). Elecia and Christopher try to keep up. We also took a detour into bass guitar electronics.

One confusing jargon part is that radio power (in dBm) is discussed as though it is voltage. For example, 10 dBM is 2V peak-to-peak; there is an implied 50 ohm resistor in the P=V*V/R calculation. The the wiki for more about decibel-milliwatts.

Tom talked about dollhouses, aka Smith charts (wiki). (We also talked about Bode plots (wiki).)

Light travels about 1 foot in 1 nanosecond (11.8 inches, 30 cm). Admiral Grace Hopper is well known for giving out nanoseconds.

The guitar company Tom mentioned working with is Alembic.

Find Tom’s writing on Medium and the Tempo Automation blog. He is on Twitter as @tomacorp and was previously on Embedded 379: Monstrous Cable Corporation.

We spoke with Phillip Johnston (@mbeddedartistry) of Embedded Artistry about consulting, writing, and learning.

In the Embedded Artistry welcome page, there is a list of Phillip’s favorite articles as well as his most popular articles. Some of Phillip’s favorites include:

• Embedded Rules of Thumb

• Improving SW with 5 LW Processes

• Learning from the Boeing 737 MAX saga

We also talked about code reviews and some best practices.

The Embedded Artistry newsletter is a good way to keep up with embedded topics. You can subscribe to it at embeddedartistry.com/newsletter

What are condition variables?

Chris and Elecia ring in the new year with a discussion of projects, hobbies, origami, DMA, music, and the new-and-improved Embedded.fm newsletter...

Pepto Bismol can be converted to metal bismuth (YouTube) which can be turned into lovely sculptures.

Chris liked his new book, Art of NASA: The Illustrations That Sold the Missions by Piers Bizony. 

Elecia liked hers, Curved Origami: Unlocking the Secrets of Curved Folding in Easy Steps by Ekaterina Lukasheva 

Guitar Fart Pedal (Kickstarter)

Elecia’s Making Embedded Systems course will have a second cohort starting in March 2022. 

Sign up for the newsletter if you want an announcement (at the bottom of the Embedded.fm Subscribe page).

Limor Fried of Adafruit spoke with us about engineering, education, and business. 

Some new boards we talked about include the PyGamer and PyBadge (which also has a lower cost version).

TinyUSB, an open and tiny USB stack from Hathach.

In addition to the many excellent tutorials there are some interesting business related posts on Adafruit Learn: How to Build a Hardware Startup and How to Start a Hackerspace

Want to get more involved with the extensive, wonderful, and supportive Adafruit community? Join their Discord chat server or Show and Tell on Wednesdays 7:30pm (ET) followed by Ask an Engineer at 8pm. 

Uri Shaked shows us Wokwi, his board and processor simulator. We checked out Arduino code in GDB and then looked at his simulator for the Cortex-M0 Raspberry Pi Pico. 

First, you should totally  look at Wokwi.com. As Christopher noted, signing up for an account shows you many other things. Then you can go look at the processors written in TypeScript in Uri’s Github repos: github.com/urish. Find Wokwi on Twitter (@WokwiMakes, Uri is @UriShaked). You can also find Wokwi on Facebook.

Uri live-coded development of the Pico’s RP2040, it is on Wokwi’s YouTube channel. You can find out more about the RP2040 or the AVR core in the ATMega family by taking his free courses on Hackaday: hackaday.io/urishaked  (Scroll down for courses.)

Uri’s homepage is urish.org. You can find The Salsa Beat Machine there as well as some of his other projects. He has a blog there as well as at Wokwi.

Susie Hansen - La Salsa Nunca Se Acaba

Tyler Hoffman joined us to talk about developing developer tools and how to drag your organization out of the stone age.

You can use GDB and Python together? Yes, yes you can. And it will change your debugging habits. (You can find many other great posts from Memfault’s Interrupt blog including one about Unit Testing Basics.) 

Tyler is a co-founder at Memfault (memfault.com), a company that works on IoT dashboards and embedded tools. On Twitter, Tyler is @ty_hoff and Memfault is @Memfault.

Control-R is a history search in shell commands (magical!). The fuzzy search tool discussed is FZF (probably even more magical!).

XKCD comic referenced: xkcd.com/1319 

Fitbit’s Tower of Terror Bug

Professor HyunJoo Oh of GeorgiaTech spoke to us about paper machines, paper mechanical movements, paper sensors, paper tiny Jansen Strandbeests, and paper art.

HyunJoo is a professor at GeorgiaTech. She is the director of the CoDe Craft group. Some of the projects we spoke about can be found on the CoDe Craft Projects page. 

PaperMech.net has demonstrations of different mechanical movements as well as FoldMecha which shows you what cardboard you need to cut out to make your own mechanical movement, including making a cardboard walker using Jansen mechanism (Theo Jansen (wikipedia) made the Strandbeest). HyunJoo recommends two books for exploring further:

• The 507 Mechanical Movements book as a way to explore more mechanical movements

• Paper Automata: Four Working Models to Cut Out and Glue Together by Rob Ives 

With Unblackboxing Computers, HyunJoo is exploring sensors that can be made with copper tape on paper. The introduction video: https://vimeo.com/637626404/f670dff03e 

Professor Carlotta Berry from Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology joined us to talk about robotics, PID tuning, engineering education, ethics, her book, and standing up in front of a classroom.

Carlotta’s book is Mobile Robotics for Multidisciplinary Study (Synthesis Lectures on Control and Mechatronics). 

She has a page at Rose-Hulman as well as a personal blog and a consulting site (NoireSTEMinist.com). She is an advocate for BlackInRobotics.org.

On Twitter, Carlotta Berry has a personal account (@DrCarlottaBerry) and a professional account (@NoireSTEMinist). She is also the @BlackInRobotics coordinator. 

An explanation of Zeigler-Nichols PID tuning with pros and cons.

Colin O’Flynn (@colinoflynn) spoke with us about security research, power analysis, and hotdogs.

Colin’s company is NewAE and you can see his Introduction to Side-Channel Power Analysis video as an intro to his training course. Or you can buy your own ChipWhisperer and go through his extensive tutorials on the wiki pages.

ChipWhisperer on Hackaday

ColinOFlynn.com

Some FPGA resource mentioned:

• Fpga4fun.com

• TinyFpga.com

• MyHdl.org (Python!)

Debra Ansell joined us to talk about making light up accessories, patenting ideas, and sharing projects.

Debra’s project website is geekmomprojects.com, she’s @geekmomprojects on Twitter and Instagram. Her github repo uses the same ID: github.com/geekmomprojects/. 

We talked about using coin cell batteries as switches. Many other accessories do this but one of our favorites was the Tiny Edge Lit Sphere.

Debra’s company is brightwearables.com. She holds patents US10813428B1 and US11092329B2.

Chris and Elecia chat about their current projects and ideas.

Elecia is teaching Making Embedded Systems at Classpert. The course is based on her book with lectures to extend the information, quizzes, homework, mentors, synchronous classes, and a final project. Starting Nov 13th, the first cohort is full but you can join the waiting list. The second cohort starts in February.

Elecia is also giving a keynote at Hackaday’s Remoticon! It is Friday Nov 19 and Saturday Nov 20. Tickets are free, get yours now! Jeremy Fielding will be the keynote speaker on Saturday. Hopefully, she’ll have figured out how to use spaghetti sharing as a metaphor for stacks and heaps by then. 

The EP for Chris’ 12AX7 album is coming out soon: #ihateeverything. The cover art is generated with a GAN from this Reddit post.

Terrible Halloween jokes are collected on Twitter under the tag #EmboodedSystems.

If you’d like to support Embedded, check out our Patreon. If you’d like to sponsor a show, click the Sponsor link.

Tyler Hoffman joined us to discuss the issues associated with embedded devices at consumer scale. We talked about firmware update, device management, and remote diagnostics for millions of devices.

Tyler is a co-founder at Memfault (memfault.com), a company that works on IoT dashboards and embedded tools. (We will invite Tyler back to talk about embedded tools but someone was preparing a lecture on firmware update and device management.)

Tyler writes for Memfault’s Interrupt blog which has excellent advice including the mentioned article about Defensive Programming. You can also find him and Memfault on Twitter: @ty_hoff, @Memfault.

Elecia is teaching Making Embedded Systems at ClasspertX, a high-quality MOOC with video lectures, quizzes, exercises, synchronous discussions classes, and a portfolio-worthy final project. The alpha cohort starts in early November and the course will run again in Q1 2022.

Alpenglow’s Carrie Sundra spoke with us about frivolous circuits, solder live streaming, and yarn.

Alpenglow Industries sells frivolous circuits, some pre-built (like FUnicorn) and some are buildables such as the cute but evil heart soldering kits called PS-I Hate You.

Carrie’s YouTube channel is alpenglowindustries where she livecasts Wednesday afternoon Pacific Time. You can still watch the Blob Solder sesh with Debra of GeekMomProjects. Please send pictures of your blobs. One of the recent videos talked about Teenage Engineering Pocket Operators. Our favorite is Arcade.

Alpenglow Yarn sells electronic-based tools for dyers and yarn creators. 

On Twitter:@alpenglowind @alpenglowyarn @frivolous_circs

On Instagram:@alpenglowind @alpenglowyarn

Alpenglow also has a Tindie store: alpenglow/ 

Janelle Shane (@JanelleCShane) shared truly weird responses from AIs. Her website is AIWeirdness.com where you can find machine-learning-generated ideas for paint colors, ice cream, and cocktails (and many other things). We never said they were good ideas.

Janelle’s FAQ will help you get started trying out RNNs yourself. We recommend the Embedded show titles.

We talked about BigGAN which generates pictures based on input images.

Wikipedia list of animals by number of neurons

Janelle’s book is You Look Like a Thing and I Love You. Sign up for her newsletter to get the PG-13 versions of her hilarious AI outputs.

Alan Cohen joined us to talk about brain waves, medical product development, open source, and helpful engineering.

Alan has been working on VolksEEG (volkseeg.org, github.com/VolksEEG/VolksEEG). This is an EEG (wiki Electroencephalography) which detects brain waves. It uses the TI ADS1299 EEG monitoring chip and the Adafruit Feather nRF52840 Sense.

Alan wrote Prototype to Product: A Practical Guide for Getting to Market, published by O’Reilly. He talked about it on a previous episode: 269: Ultra-Precise Death Ray You can find him on twitter as @proto2product  and on LinkedIn. 

Helpful Engineering (helpfulengineering.org) aims to deliver more open source solutions to society’s systemic challenges.

Chris and Elecia discuss civic duties, the CAN bus, fulfilling Kickstarter orders, and the answers to a series of questions about embedded systems.

Elecia was recently introduced to TRIZ inventive principles (wikipedia page) and started reading And Suddenly the Inventor Appeared: TRIZ: Theory of Inventive Problem Solving by Genrich Altshuller.

You can support the show by becoming a patron on Patreon: patreon.com/embedded 

Or your company can sponsor a show, see the Sponsor page of embedded.fm

We spoke to author Robin Sloan about his books and near-future science fiction.

Robin wrote Mr. Penumbra’s 24 Hour Bookstore and Sourdough.

Find Robin on twitter as @robin_____sloan. Robin’s website is robinsloan.com. Go there for some short stories, sign up for his newsletter and check out his new ‘zine (also at wizard.limo). Oh! Don’t forget his blog, including a description of his neural net for audio generation and for writing.

Some books Robin suggested:

• Home: A Short History of an Idea by Witold Rybczynshi

• Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie

• Hild by Nicola Griffith

Sunshine Jones spoke with us about synthesizers, electronics, and philosophy.

Find him on twitter @Sunshine_Jones and instagram at sunshine_jones_

Sunshine’s music is most easily found at TheUrgencyOfChange.com. His writing is at Sunshine-Jones.com.

We talked about Sunshine’s User’s Guide to the Roland SE-02. That includes Ahmed, a track produced using only the SE-02.

Sunshine also wrote about building a polysynth.

The intro music is an excerpt from LELEK, released on Air Texture Vol. V. The exit music is Fall In Love Not In Line, released this year on vinyl only, TUOC01. See TheUrgencyOfChange.com for more.

Sunshine was the host of SundaySoul.com, a live podcast about music and life.

Ingo Muschenetz spoke with us about software, management, podcasts, and interacting with people. 

Ingo’s LinkedIn page

Ingo works for Axway, they are hiring: Axway Careers

Ingo keeps up with many podcasts, here are some of his favorites:

Podcasts that talk about a complex topic, provide insight

• Throughline

• Planet Money

• Indicator  https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510325/the-indicator-from-planet-money

• Freakonomics

Podcasts with interviews and discussions about lives and careers

• Conan OBrian https://www.earwolf.com/show/conan-obrien

• Andy Richter  https://www.earwolf.com/show/the-three-questions-with-andy-richter/

• Fresh Air

Podcasts that don’t fit into a category other than “interesting”:

• 99% invisible

• 20000 Hz

• RadioLab https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab

Podcasts that Ingo didn’t mention but meant to:

• The Daily: https://www.nytimes.com/column/the-daily

• Software Engineering Daily: https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/

• The Bugle: https://www.thebuglepodcast.com/

• Switched on Pop: https://switchedonpop.com/

• Gastropod: https://gastropod.com/

Jeremy Fielding spoke with us about mechanical engineering, robotics, robot operating system, YouTube, and solving problems. You can find all of Jeremy’s links on his main site: jeremyfielding.com but here are a few short cuts:

• YouTube channel: Jeremy Fielding

• Twitter: @jeremy_fielding

• Instagram: @jeremy_fielding

• Patreon: jeremyfieldingsr

Jeremy’s Industrial arm punching video

Elecia’s typing robot

Jeremey had a neat way to go about solving a problem. He called it Dr. FARM:

• D Define the problem

• R Research other solutions, partial solutions, terminology

• F Function: what do I want it it do?

• A Appearance: what should it look like?

• R Risk: is anyone going to get hurt in manufacture and function?

• M Model: prototype the design

AR3 Open Source Control Software and a version with ROS MoveIt

Liam Cadigan joined us to talk about founding a successful startup from a college capstone project. Liam is a co-founder of InspectAR and worked on the board files the system uses.

Liam can be found on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Check out InspectAR. They are also on Twitter and on Instagram.

The Inventor's Dilemma: The Remarkable Life of H. Joseph Gerber

Alex Glow filled our heads with project ideas.

Alex is the Resident Hardware Nerd at Hackster.io. Her page is glowascii and you might want to see Archimedes the AI robot owl and the Hardware 101 channel. They have many sponsored contests including BadgeLove. You can find her on Twitter at @glowascii.

Lightning round led us to many possibles:

• It you were building an IoT stuffed animal, what would you use? Mycroft and Snips are what is inside Archimedes.

• If you were building a camera to monitor a 3d printer, what would you use? For her M3D Micro Printer, Alex would use the Raspberry Pi based OctoPi to monitor it.

• If you were going to a classroom of 2nd graders, what boards would you take? The BBC Micro:bit (based on Code Bug) or some LittleBits kits (Star Wars Droid Inventor Kit and Korg Synth Kit are on Amazon (those are Embedded affiliate links, btw).

• If you were going to make a car-sized fighting robot, what dev system would you use? The Open Source Novena DIY Laptop initially designed Bunnie Huang

There were more software and hardware kits to explore:

• Google DIY AI

• Arduino Maker1000

• Raspberry Pi Chirp.io   

For your amusement Floppotron plays Bohemian Rhapsody

Alex gave a shout out to her first hackerspace All Hands Active

Ableton is audio workstation and sequencer software. Alex recommends Women’s Audio Mission as a good way to learn audio production and recording if you are in the San Francisco area.

There is an Interplanetary File System and Alex worked on a portable printer console for it.

Elecia is always willing to talk about Ty the typing robot and/or narwhals teaching Bayes Rule. She recommended the book There Are No Electrons: Electronics for Earthlings by Kenn Amdahl.

Mario Marchese (aka Mario the Maker Magician) spoke with us about robots performing magic, humans performing magic, and writing a book about making magic. We also covered art, making, learning, Sesame Street, performance, design, humor, Piff the Magic Dragon [sic], magic secrets, and gracefully handling technological failure.

You can find Mario on:

• His website mariothemagician.com

• YouTube (MariotheMagicianNYC)

• Instagram (mariothemagician)

• Twitter (@mariomagician)

• Facebook (mariothemagician). 

His book is The Maker Magician's Handbook: A Beginner's Guide to Magic + Making.

We talked about Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, 19th century French watchmaker, magician and illusionist, and the amazing Aldo Colombini.

Leah Buechley spoke with us about the intersection of computer science and art. She is an associate professor in the computer science department of the University of New Mexico where she directs the Hand and Machine research group.

Her website is leahbuechley.com, her research group website is handandmachine.cs.unm.edu. You can find her on Twitter at @leahbuechley.

She wrote the book Textile Messages: Dispatches From the World of E-Textiles and Education and developed the LilyPad Arduino for wearable electronics.

We talked about Chibitronics, paper circuits, developed by Jie Qi  (who was on Embedded 277: The Sport of Kings talking about patents as well as Chibitronics)

We talked about Nettrice Gaskins’ Techno-Vernacular Creativity and Innovation: Culturally Relevant Making Inside and Outside of the Classroom

An example of a tiny stepper motor on eBay

Introduction to VQGAN + CLIP to generate art

Chris (@stoneymonster) and Elecia (@logicalelegance) discuss Blender, Make, TCP/IP, and listener questions (mostly about the podcast itself).

Lightweight IP: an open source TCP/IP stack for embedded systems

Look for Lazy Tutorials for Blender in Ian Hubert’s YouTube Channel or if you want something a little simpler, try the Blender Beginner Tutorial (donut!).

Ukulele and acoustic guitar kits are at StewMac.com

Book with sponge sneeze information: Brilliant Abyss by Helen Scales

This episode was sponsored by InspectAR. If you design, debug, or just need to use PCBs, InspectAR can give you superpowers. It’s an augmented reality app and platform that allows you to visualize every layer, every connection, every aspect of your actual physical board in real time

InspectAR is free for trial and home use. With a subscription you get powerful collaboration and debugging features including annotating the AR view, sharing comments, setting up test and calibration procedures. Check it out!

Adelle Lin (@Adellelin) spoke with us about wearables, art, playfulness, and getting together in virtual reality. Adelle’s website is touchtech.io.

For some VR get togethers, Adelle recommends AltSpace (altvr.com) and Mozilla Hubs (hubs.mozilla.com). Some other remote get togethers:

• Virtual Burning Man (August 29 - September 7, 2021)

• A. Maze Conference (July 21-24, 2021, remote)

We mentioned the Nautilus jigsaw puzzle from Nervous Systems but actually have the smaller Ammonite one.

Tom Anderson (@tomacorp) joined us to talk about floating pins, ADCs, and teaching and learning things. Tom mentioned Horowitz and Hill’s Art of Electronics and the vintage books on TubeBooks.org.

Tom wrote about  JFETs and vacuum tubes and Power Supply Filter Design for PCBs. He recommended the TI app note on floating inputs and a power supply book: Modern DC-to-DC Switchmode Power Converter Circuits.

You can fine more of Tom’s writing on Medium and the Tempo Automation blog.

Other books:

• Practical Handbook of Curve Design and Generation and CRC Standard Curves and Surfaces

• Analog Integrated Circuit Design by Johns and Martin

• Analog Circuit Design by Jim Williams

Other Vintage Books:

• Abramowitz and Stegun Handbook of Mathematical Functions (Applied mathematics)

• Typical Oscilloscope Circuitry by Tektronix

• Radiotron Designer's Handbook (TubeBooks.org)

• Dynamical Analogies (TubeBooks.org)

Alan Cohen (@proto2product) wrote a great book about taking an idea and making it into a product. We spoke with him about the development process and the eleven deadly sins of product development. We did not talk about ultra-precise death rays.

Books we discussed:

• Alan’s Prototype to Product: A Practical Guide for Getting to Market

• Elecia’s Making Embedded Systems

• The Mythical Man-Month, Anniversary Edition: Essays On Software Engineering by Frederick P. Brooks Jr.  

• The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change by Camille Fournier

Alan mentioned writing software graphically with Enterprise Architect

Nitya Narasimhan (@nitya) spoke with us about visualizing learning, visual storytelling, sketchnotes, and finding a job that satisfies.

Nitya’s sketchnotes are all available on the @sketchthedocs Twitter stream that includes links to the hi-res drawing, a time-lapse of the drawing being created, and a blog post describing the information in more detail. The hi-res images are also on github, or if you have fast internet to download them all: cloud-skills.dev. 

If you’d like to create your own visual notes, sketchthedocs.dev has resources for talks and books you might find helpful. More talks can be found from #VisualieIT 2020.

In July (links are not live until July 1, 2021), Microsoft and Nitya will be celebrating IoT with JulyOT including an introduction for beginners.

Nitya’s personal site is nitya.dev

On this quick bonus episode, Elecia and Christopher chat about their various recent projects, some of which have just been released into the wild.

Christopher’s band 12AX7 just launched their album Kickstarter, which was selected as one of Kickstarter’s "Projects We Love”. Check it out here if you are interested in finding out more or backing it. It’ll run through July 16th at 10am Pacific Time.

Elecia’s Embedded Online Conference talk on map files will be posted publicly on June 22nd, so be on the lookout for that. In the meantime, the slides and examples are available here at embedded.fm/blog/MapFiles (and on Github)

If you’d like other Embedded merchandise such as a mug (many different options), Memory Map Land mousepad (or different poster), we have a Zazzle store.

Her lightning talk about origami, Snails, Paper, and Programming: A Computational Approach to Mollusc Morphology in Origami, is already on Youtube and you can watch it now! Elecia’s origami github can be found here.

Finally if you are interested in having your cat or cats appear in 12AX7’s upcoming music video, send Dropbox/Google Drive/iCloud/whatever links to your clips, along with how you’d like to be credited, to [email protected]. Use the subject line “Cats for 12AX7”.

Erin Kennedy (@RobotGrrl) spoke with us about learning new things, nice robots at the beach, lighting up fog voxels, and being part of the maker community.

Erin’s Robot Missions (@RobotMissions) was founded to develop robots to clean shorelines of plastic. Her personal website is robotgrrl.xyz (check out the project showcase). 

Erin also worked on a Hackaday Dream Team that worked on innovations to reduce the environmental impact of lost or abandoned fishing equipment.

From his view in retirement, David Comer spoke with us about continuing to learn, staying engaged in an engineering career, and how the Galileo memory module worked.

Brittany Postnikoff (@Straithe) spoke with us about scary robots, neat stickers, and contributing to open source projects.

Brittany’s website is straithe.com and her sticker channel is twitch.tv/str41the. Her github repo has curated reading lists on technical topics.

She’s working at Great Scott Gadgets, maker of a variety of hardware tools including Luna, a toolkit for working with USB. (This was mentioned on a previous Embedded show, 337: Not Completely Explode with Kate Tempkin.)

And if you want Embedded merchandise like mugs, mousepads, and wall art, we have a store for you.

Tenaya Hurst Conklin (@TenayaHurst) discussed STEAM teaching tools and kits from RAFT (@RAFTBayArea). 

RAFT is at raft.net. The Abiotic Dissection activity is pretty amusing (from the STEAM Learning Sheets) as are the games in the idea sheets. They also have a summer camp and a Youtube channel.

Tenaya’s website is roguemaking.com. She was previously on Embedded 49: Is that an Arduino in your pocket?

Sarah Petkus offers to let her robot lick Christopher's leg. Christopher agrees reluctantly once we determine the saliva will be anti-bacterial hand sanitizer.

Sarah is a kinetic artist and some of her projects include a robot army (built your own from parts printed out or purchased at robot-army.com), Noodlefeet, and Carl (the flamingo of pendulum inversion). Her Zoness.com site is an umbrella for her drawn and robotic art. Specifically, you may enjoy her webcomic Gravity Road, her YouTube channel, and/or her Robotic Arts blog.

Some other topics we discussed:

• Sarah got into mechatronics at her time as SAIC.

• Festo's air jellyfish on youtube

• Algodoo.com 2d physics simulator

• Woodgears.ca for 3d printable gears

Also, please check out our new embedded.fm/blog or if you prefer email updates, sign up at embedded.fm/subscribe.

It’s another Elecia and Chris episode and this time we cover handling hourly work when the task doesn’t neatly divide into hours, using Docker (and Conda and Virtualenv) for development, growing the podcast, overdoing conference talks, and trying to find a new laptop. Phew!

The Embedded Online Conference is coming up the week of May 17th 2021, and Elecia’s talk will be Buried Treasure and Map Files (Note: the coupon code is still valid and mentioned early in the episode. Elecia will also put up a copy of her talk on YouTube after some time.)

Anne Barela (@anne_engineer) spoke with us about working as an engineer in the US Foreign Service and writing tutorials for Adafruit. Anne has also written two books: Getting Started with Adafruit Trinket and Getting Started with Adafruit Circuit Playground Express.

To see Anne’s writing on Adafruit, check out her page: learn.adafruit.com/users/AnneBarela

We also looked at Adafruit’s Home Automation board.

Doug Ellison (@doug_ellison), Engineering Camera Team Lead at NASA’s JPL and Martian photographer, spoke with us about low power systems, cameras, clouds, and dust devils on Mars.

The best paper for learning more is from NASA’s JPL site: The Mars Science Laboratory Engineering Cameras

Mars rovers wiki

Alvaro Prieto (@alvaroprieto) spoke with us about cheese, making, work, the reverse engineering podcast, weather, and motivation.

Alvaro is a host of the Unnamed Reverse Engineering podcast. Some of his favorite episodes include #41 with Samy Kamkar, #14 with Joe Grand, and #23 with Major Malfunction. (Jen Costillo co-hosts the show and has been on Embedded several times.)

Alvaro works at Sofar Ocean, making oceanic sensing platforms. He has a personal website linking to his other exploits.

We talked about some Embedded episodes as well:

• #282 with Laughlin Barker about OpenROV

• #174 with Evan Shapiro about baby monitors and professional poker 

Also, we’ve all really enjoyed the Disney’s Mandolorian.

Chris and Elecia talk with each other about contracting, architecture, origami research, Digilent’s new oscilloscope, TensorFlow, map files, conference talks, art and the upcoming 12AX7 album.

Digilent sent us a pre-production Analog Discovery Pro ADP3450.

Elecia’s Origami Github.

Embedded Patreon

Embedded Online Conference talk Buried Treasure and Map Files (Note: the coupon code from Jacob’s show is still valid and Elecia will put up a copy of her talk on YouTube.)

12XA7, we’ll let you know when the Kickstarter goes live.

Finally! An episode with version control! And D&D! Chris Svec (@christophersvec) joins us to discuss why version control is critical to professional software development and what the most important concepts are.

T-Shirts are on sale for a limited time: US distributor and EU distributor.

You can read more from Chris on the Embedded Blog. He writes the ESE101 column (new posts soon!).

If you are new to version control or learning git, Atlassian has a great set of posts and tutorials from high level “what is version control?” to helping you figure out good usage models (Svec mentioned gitflow). Atlassian has an interactive tutorial that lets you try out the repository commands (or try the Github interactive tutorials). Of course, there is a good O’Reilly book about git.

If you are using SVN (aka Subversion), the Red Bean book from O’Reilly is a good resource.

(Elecia's shirt said You Obviously Like Owls from topatoco.com.)

Al Sweigart (@AlSweigart) spoke with us about getting better at Python programming. 

Al’s book site is InventWithPython.com. You can find his books there as well as No Starch Press and Amazon. 

• Automate the Boring Stuff with Python

• Beyond the Basic Stuff with Python

• Cracking Codes with Python

• Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python

Al’s personal site (alsweigart.com) has talks, videos, and a lot of code to look at. Or check out his github repo including the small text based games: https://github.com/asweigart/pythonstdiogames

Al’s YouTube Channel, including his Calm Programming series.

We also talked about:

• scratch.mit.edu - a fun way to learn to program where you are almost never wrong

• Fluent Python: Clear, Concise, and Effective Programming by Luciano Ramalho.

• PyCon and their talk videos 

• Online origami simulator (origamisimulator.org)

Dr. Ayanna Howard (@robotsmarts, wiki) spoke with us about sex, race, and robots. 

Ayanna’s Audible book is Sex, Race, and Robots: How to Be Human in the Age of AI. You can see more of her research from her Google Scholar page.

Find some best practices and tools for reducing bias AI:

• Partnership on AI 

• AI Fairness 360 (IBM)

• Model Cards (Google)

Ayanna has recently moved from being Professor and Department Chair at Georgia Tech to be Dean of Engineering at The Ohio State University. Her current favorite robot is Pepper.

Ayanna spoke more about her robotics and trust research on Embedded 207: I Love My Robot Monkey Head (transcript). 

Laurel Cummings (@justblamelaurel) teaches people how to build what is required with the material on hand. We talked with her about how to engineer survival solutions on-the-fly, often while performing disaster relief. Also: what could be made with chewing gum and paper clips.

Laurel works at Building Momentum (buildmo.com). They are currently hiring.

Laurel spoke at SuperCon 2019 about Austere Engineering.

Cy Keener spoke with us about sensors, Arduinos, ice, and the crossover between art and science.

You can see some of his field work and gallery installations at his site: cykeener.com and on his vimeo channel. Cy is an art professor at the University of Maryland (bio, youtube)

Cy’s advisor at Stanford was Paul DeMarinis (pauldemarinis.org, Stanford page).

Arduiniana: a blog of useful Arduino libraries

We also talked about some custom sensors by Lovro Valcic of Bruncin (bruncin.com).

Jacob Beningo spoke with us about embedded systems, conference talks, writing articles and books, and best practices in development. Jacob is a consultant and instructor, see his website for more details (beningo.com).

Jacob is one of the organizers of the Embedded Online Conference, May 18,19, and 20. Session times is generally noted in Eastern Time (Americas). A coupon code for a discount on registration is in the show. Jacob will be giving a talk called Best Practices for RTOS Application Design.

He likes the full visibility of tracing, using the Segger J-Trace with SystemView or Precipio.

Jacob has written three books:

• MicroPython Projects: A do-it-yourself guide for embedded developers to build a range of applications using Python

• Reusable Firmware Development: A Practical Approach to APIs, HALs and Drivers

• API Standard for MCUs

He’s also written many articles for Embedded.com as well as his own blog.

He recommends the IEEE Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (SWEBOK). The SWEBOK is a free download from IEEE, which covers the best practices that engineers should be following when they develop software along with processes and strategies.

Jacob also recommends Renesas’ Synergy Software Quality Handbook that describes the processes that they used to develop and validate their software.

Alana Sherman of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI, @MBARI_News) spoke with us about engineering for deep sea environments and jelly creatures.

Alana’s MBARI page notes that she worked on DeepPIV and the Benthic Rover. She is also a part of the BioInspiration Lab.

Larvaceans: image search, short video, or (my favorite!) the long video.

It is probably too late to purchase tshirts but… in case it isn’t, here is the link.

Chris and Elecia chat about their projects, Python, choosing boards, social media, tshirts, and self care.

T Shirts are on sale until the end of February! To decode the titles check out the giant list of all embedded episodes.

Our social media empire is growing. Please follow us on any of these sites:

• Twitter @embeddedfm

• Instagram @embeddedpodcast

• Facebook @embeddedfm

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• Patreon Embedded

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2021 Embedded Online Conference is May 18-19 & 20, 2021

Raspberry Pi Pico

Meaning of underscores in Python and Python CTypes

Ariel Waldman (@arielwaldman) spoke with us about how science, art, and all of the other disciplines can build a better world.

Ariel does many amazing things, it is hard to list them all.

• Homepage: arielwaldman.com

• YouTube: arielwaldman

• Science Hack Day: sciencehackday.org and Twitter @ScienceHackDay

• Space Hack directory of ways to get involved: spacehack.org

• Patreon page: arielwaldman

• Book: What's It Like in Space?: Stories from Astronauts Who've Been There

• NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts council, look at niacfellows.org to apply.

Ariel fell in love with NASA while watching the When We Left Earth miniseries.

Christelle Rohaut (@chrisrohaut) spoke with us about circular economies and how innovation can build better cities.

Christelle is co-founder and CEO of Codi. She is on the Forbes 30 under 30 list. 

Second Harvest Food Bank

Ben Hest of Digikey (@digikey) answered questions about finding parts, warehouses, packaging orders, and sweeping components off the floor.

The Digikey website: digikey.com. It is ok to click around, looking for a ton of information (as well as parts). 

Want to see someone search for parts? Limor at Adafruit does this every week in The Great Search videos!

Ben’s favorite new parts are the Raspberry Pi Pico and the Parallax Propeller 2.

Embedded T-shirts are available!

You could also have your own waffle paper maker: Geami Wrap.

Digikey is hiring for IT and Software Engineering positions! Check out their open jobs here.

Thea Flowers (Stargirl, @theavalkyrie) creates open source and open hardware craft synthesizers that use Circuit Python for customization. She also writes about the internals of the SAMD21.

Thea’s synthesizer modules are found at Winterbloom, including Castor & Pollux and the Big Honking Button. It is all open source hardware so you can find code and schematics on Thea’s github site: github.com/theacodes 

Thea’s site is thea.codes. You can find her blog there with deeply technical and detailed posts such as The most thoroughly commented linker script (probably), The Design of the Roland Juno oscillators, and Understanding the SAMD21 Clocks. 

For more information about the Eurorack, listen to Embedded 356: Deceive and Manipulate You with Leonardo Laguna Ruiz of Vult.

Emily Velasco (@MLE_Online) spoke with us about artistic projects, retro-future aesthetics, and scientific communication. 

She shows and describes the projects on YouTube: Emily’s Electric Oddities including the Optical Sound Decoder, Port-A-Vid, Hairy Cacti, and the Lissajukebox.

Many of Emily’s professional writings can be found on Wevolver, usually redirected to sites where they are published.

Chris and Elecia talk about making albums, making progress, DIY shot reporting, getting credit, and project management.

Check out the Embedded transcripts (now with older shows appearing weekly!).  The Embedded Patreon provides the funds for guest mics, transcripts (new and old), and new shirt designs. Thank you very much to the supporters.

Thank you to our listeners for raising over $5000 for DigitalNest!

Books and articles mentioned:

• Tessellations for Everyone

• Risk Up Front: Managing Projects in a Complex World

• Software Project Survival Guide 

• Object-oriented design patterns in the kernel

• Open source gunshot sensor

Thank you to 2020 sponsors including Qt and Triplebyte as well as InterWorking Labs for their early patreon-business-level support.

We spoke with Kathleen Tuite (@kaflurbaleen) about augmented reality, computer vision, games with a purpose, and meetups.

Kathleen’s personal site (filled with many interesting projects we didn’t talk about) is SuperFireTruck.com. Her graduate work was in using photogrammetry to build models.

Kathleen works for GrokStyle, a company that lets you find furniture you like based on what you see. GrokStyle is used in the Augmented Reality try-it-at-home IKEA Place app.

• Theory of Fun for Game Design by Raph Koster

• Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

• Language translating/learning app and online game is Duolingo

• TensorFlow in Javascript

• HCOMP 2018: Human Computer Conference with Keynote by Zooniverse’s Lucy Fortson (no video for that yet but we hope)

Leonardo Laguna Ruiz of Vult spoke with us about modelling electronics, modular synthesizers, and modulating sound. We talked in detail about applied digital signal processing.

Leonardo’s website is www.vult-dsp.com. Check out the Freak Filter, the user manual alone is a course in signal processing. You can buy finished or DIY versions on vult-dsp.com/store. 

The physical hardware is a Eurorack module (wiki) but the Vult modules are also available for the VCV Rack, a Eurorack simulator that you can use to build your own modular synthesizer. 

Leonardo has a YouTube channel where he goes in depth on signal processing: youtube.com/c/LeonardoLagunaRuiz. He’s also written about modeling vintage analog sound on the Wolfram blog.

For more information about the Vult programming language (or an example for how to build your own, check out the github repository: http://modlfo.github.io/vult/overview/ This episode was sponsored by Qt, a cross platform application framework for desktop, mobile and embedded devices. That means you get a full set of libraries for nearly everything you can think of, plus a world-class GUI that will give you a native look wherever your code runs.

Try Qt for free at www.qt.io/download (qt.io/embeddedfm ! And check out Qt for MCUs!)

Helen Leigh (@helenleigh) joined us to talk about music, electronics, books, and starting a new job at CrowdSupply (@crowd_supply).

Helen was previously on Embedded #261: Blowing Their Fragile Little Minds where we talked about subversive geography, her book The Crafty Kid's Guide to DIY Electronics, and the mini.mu musical gloves.

Helen has a book coming out in 2021 about DIY Music Tech including a soft version of the Michel Waisvisz' CrackleBox (Kraakdos). Check out some of the projects in HackSpace magazine issue 36 and 37 (the book will be serialised in HackSpace). Or look on YouTube for some examples of Helen’s purring tentacle and her circuit sculpture harp.

Helen mentioned Bunnie Huang’s Precursor, an open mobile phone, on CrowdSupply (campaign ending shortly).

The Giant German Congress mentioned is the CCC Congress Festival

Helen’s preferred thread (the one you can actually get) is Madiera’s conductive threads. Hit the contact link for purchasing. (Helen notes you can use it for both sides in a sewing machine!)

Becky Worledge of the Qt Company (@qtproject) spoke with us about application frameworks, organizing large code bases, and automotive regulations.

The best place to get started with Qt is the getting started page: doc.qt.io/qt-5/gettingstarted.html 

Or skip that and head straight for the code: github.com/qt

Maybe backtrack to see what is available: qt.io/product/features

Hmm, was there talk of Qt and Python? PySide was it? qt.io/qt-for-python

But wait, Qt for MCU? What platforms are supported? QtForMCUs/qtul-supported-platforms.html

Finally, don’t get eaten by a Grue, sense when they are coming: doc.qt.io/qt-5/qtsensors-grue-example.html

Qt6 is coming out Dec 2020. So maybe replace all the qt-5 in the links with qt-6 to see if it is ready yet!

Oh, and Qt is hiring: qt.io/careers

The quote at the end is not from Abraham Lincoln. (Quote Investigator). Still a good thought.

Seth Hillbrand (@SethHillbrand), lead developer for KiCAD (@kicad_pcb), spoke with us about open source development, EDA tools, pronunciation, and inclusion.

Check out KiCAD!

Seth’s company provides support for KiCAD (kipro-pcb.com, @kiproeda).

John McMaster (@johndmcmaster) told us about the process of opening up chips to see how the processors are structured and what the firmware says. 

See John’s website for information on getting started (as well as digging much deeper).

John has given some interesting Hardwear.io talks including Capturing Mask ROMs and Taming Hydrofluoric Acid to Extract Firmware. His talks and many others are available on the Hardwear.io archive. Or sign up for the Hardwear.io Online Hardware Security Training, Berlin Jan 2021.

As mentioned in the show:

• John wrote a blog post about his top lab accidents and explosions.

• Paper: Reverse engineering Flash EEPROM memories using Scanning Electron Microscopy by Franck Courbon, Sergei Skorobogatov, and Christopher Woods

• Rompar and bitract are the two programs mentioned as helpful for getting from an image to binary code.

Chris and Elecia discuss transcripts, lightsabers, seashells, python, numpy, matlab and how to get into embedded systems development.

Embedded show transcripts are available at embedded.fm/transcripts 

Elecia’s origami github repository includes a python script for generating origami shell folding patterns. The paper described was Analysis of Shell Coiling: General Problems by David M. Raup from the Journal of Paleontology , Sep., 1966, Vol. 40, No. 5.

Chris used this model to print his lightsaber: Star Wars Lightsaber (Normal version) from YouMagine

The episode was sponsored by Triplebyte. If you are looking to prove your skills, develop your knowledge, or find a job you love, check out Triplebyte.

Ben Hencke (@ledmage, @im889) updated us on blinking lights and running a small hardware business. You can find the current PixelBlaze in the Electomage store on Tindie (tindie.com/stores/electromage/) or signup for a shiny new version on CrowdSupply.

Ben’s personal site (bhencke.com) has lots of projects including a page devoted to the awesome Pixelblaze projects (including the BioTronEsis alien light sea creatures which someone who hosts this show hopes will be in her Christmas stocking).

When Ben is making Pixelblaze, the brand is ElectroMage (electromage.com/) so you can see more about Pixelblaze there including the forum.

We didn’t talk about TapGlo, the arcade ping pong table that Ben is also working on.

Favorite solder paste: LOCTITE GC 10 paste (henkel-adhesives)

About his favorite acronym, Ben says, “XMLHttpRequest is my favorite because it perfectly illustrates how we're (developers) bad at naming things and like to come up with arbitrary rules for things. The story about how XML is all caps and Html is camel case is just too perfect, and it's popular use rarely has anything to do with XML”

Finally, There are 40 different flavors of Kit Kat. There are 12 flavors of candy corn, they all taste the same.

Christine Sunu (@christinesunu) spoke with us about the feelings we get from robots.

For more information about emotive design, check out Christine’s website: christinesunu.com. From there you can find hackpretty.com, some of her talks (including the TED talk with the Fur Worm), and links to her projects (such as Starfish Cat and a Cartoon Guide to the Internet of Things). You can find more of her writing and videos on BuzzFeed and The Verge. You can also hire her product development company Flash Bang.

Embedded 142: New and Improved Appendages is where Sarah Petkus offers to let her robot lick us.

Keepon Robot (or on Wikipedia)

Books we talked about:

• Accelerando by Charles Stross

• Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less by Sherry Turkle (MIT site)

• Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age by Sherry Turkle (MIT site)

• Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness by Peter Godfrey-Smith (Note: Elecia also wrote a whole octopus annotated bibliography in a recent post)

Drew Fustini (@pdp7) spoke with us about building Linux, RISC-V cores, and many other things. Links, so many links!

Drew is a board member of the BeagleBoard.org Foundation and of the Open Source Hardware Association (OSHWA.org). He is an open source hardware designer at OSHPark (he recommends their blog!). He writes a monthly column for Hackspace Magazine, for example The Rise of the FPGA in Issue 26 and  Intro to RISC-V. 

Yocto is a tool to help build a Linux distribution specific to your board and application! Bootlin offers free training material for Yocto and OpenEmbedded (as well as many other things such as Embedded Linux and Linux kernel development). Or there is a video: Buildroot vs Yocto: Differences for Your Daily Job - Luca Ceresoli at Embedded Linux Conference. Or look at Embedded Apprentice Linux Engineer (e-ale.org). Or maybe another video: “Yocto Project Dev Day Virtual 2020 #3: Yocto Project Kernel Lab, Hands-On, Part 1” by Trevor Woerner.

RISC-V is an open source processor core. Well, cores. But you can try them out in hardware even if you don’t want to play with an FPGA. The SiSpeed Longan Nano has a GigaDevices microcontroller dev board (with an OLED on board!, more info).

Did you know you can run Linux on RISC-V? The cheapest method is emulation and Renode is brilliant for that. Here is Drew using it on the train (twitter). Sipeed boards with Kendryte K210 start at only $13 and can even run Linux (tutorial). There are also affordable open hardware FPGA with free software toolchain support like the ICE40 based Icebreaker and Fomu. For a bit more money, the bigger ECP5 can run Linux. Or look at Greg Davill’s wonderful Orange Crab. For a lot more money but on silicon, the Icicle with Microchip PolarFire SoC is aimed at corporate use.

Or you can produce your own physical chips. For free (for a limited time). See the talk from Tim Ansell - Skywater PDK: Fully open source manufacturable PDK for a 130nm process

Drew attends a lot of conferences, here are highlights from the past:

• OHS 2020 wrist badge 

• OHS 2018 epaper badge 

• ELC-2018 EALE Buildroot - Thomas Petazzoni 

• ELC-2018 EALE Bitbake YP - Behan Webster

• Linux on RISC-V with open hardware and open FPGA tools

  • Sldies for Embedded Linux Conference

  • Video from FOSS North

• Linaro Connect BoF: gpio and pinctrl in Linux kernel (Slides)

• RISC-V: How an open ISA benefits hardware security (Slides)

  • (Hardwear.io video)

   

Here are some future conferences he’s planning to attend:

• Embedded Linux Conference Europe ($50) October 26-29, 2020 (Virtual)

• Yocto Project Virtual Summit ($40) October 29-30, 2020 (Virtual)

• Open Hardware Summit March 13, 2020

Whitney Huang of Zipline (@zipline) spoke with us about drone delivery of medical products: technology, operations, and applications.

For more information about Zipline, check out flyzipline.com. Also, Zipline is hiring for positions in San Francisco, CA, USA, North America and Ghana, Africa.

Tacocopter was a thing in 2011. (Ok, not a very serious thing but still.)

Chris (@stoneymonster) and Elecia (@logicalelegance) discuss API design and team dynamics.

Elecia’s book: Making Embedded Systems

Embedded Patreon

StewMac (Ukulele kits)

Transcript: embedded.fm/transcripts/347

Sophy Wong (@sophywong) creates projects she can wear and writes about them so others can make them as well. We talked about fashion, design, inspiration, and motivation.

Sophy’s website is sophywong.com. We spoke about her book, Wearable Tech Projects. Check out her projects on Adafruit, Hackspace Magazine and Make Magazine. She also did a video interview with Tested.

Sophy’s space suit was used in Saul’s King of Misery music video.

Sophy has found inspiration in Debby Millman’s podcast Design Matters, Diana Eng’s Fashion Geek: Clothes Accessories Tech, and the work of Sagmeister.

Transcript: embedded.fm/transcripts/346

Gretchen Walker gave advice on creating a BLE iOS application.

Gretchen wrote The Ultimate Guide to Apple’s Core Bluetooth on the PunchThrough (@PunchThrough) blog. There are many other good posts on the blog about BLE from a device perspective and app development (iOS and Android). PunchThrough also makes LightBlue, a great BLE debugging app you can find wherever you find your mobile apps. 

PunchThrough is hiring embedded software engineers in the Minneapolis, MN area. 

Chris and Gretchen both recommend Ray Wenderlich’s site for learning about Swift. Chris also liked the Big Nerd Ranch books: iOS Programming and Swift Programming. 

Elecia liked the NovelBits.io writeup about getting maximum throughput on BLE.

Apple Accessory Design Guide

Ben Hencke (@im889) spoke with us about OHWS, Tindie, and blinking lights.

Ben sells his Pixelblaze WiFi LED controller on his ElectroMage store on Tindie. It is based on the ESP8266 and uses the DotStar (APA102) lights.

To hear John Leeman’s trip report on the Open Hardware Summit (OHWS), listen to Don’t Panic Geocast, Episode 140 – “Juicero of Tractors”

Ben’s websites are bhencke.com and electromage.com. Go there if you want to see some of Ben’s projects, including Synthia. You can also find Ben on Hackaday, Github, and YouTube.

We talked with Charles Lohr about ESP8266 WiFi controlled lights and ColorChord on Embedded.fm episode 102: The Deadly Fluffy Bunny (With WiFi).

Laser cut mandalas

OSHPark

Small Batch Assembly

More about the 4-bit Radio Shack computer (and an Arduino-based emulator for it!)

Santa Cruz Idea Fab Lab

Kitty Yeung (@KittyArtPhysics) spoke with us about the superposition of quantum computing and fashion. 

If you want to learn more about quantum computing, check out Kitty’s series on Hackaday’s  Quantum Computing Through Comics. 

Kitty works for Microsoft in Quantum Computing (@MSFTQuantum).

Kitty’s art and fashion are available on her site, Art By Physicist, and shop shop.kittyyeung.com. Her recent addition is the Constellation Dress. There is a coupon code in the show.

Kitty has some other DIY fashion projects: Made of Mars and Saturn Dress.

@artbyphysicist on Instagram 

LinkedIn

Chris and Elecia discuss transcripts, listener emails, and brains.

We already have a post about the dangers of using Arduino for professional work.

Elecia got a Cricut Maker to help her make origami and then discovered SVG files were editable (Intro to SVG). She’s putting her origami crease patterns in a github repo eleciawhite/origami), where else would you put it?

About brains, Elecia was reading from Smart But Scattered.

Jess Frazelle (@jessfraz) of Oxide Computer (@oxidecomputer) spoke with us about hyperscalers (large companies that make their own datacenter server hardware) and podcasts. 

Jess wrote an article about the power efficiency measurements of datacenter servers: Power to the People (ACM Queue August 2020).

The Oxide podcast is available on oxide.computer/podcast as well as your usual podcast apps. Jess particularly recommended the episode with Jonathan Blow.

Oxide is working to make hyperscaler-style hardware available to everyone. Their goal is to open source all their hardware and software: github.com/oxidecomputer. They use the Rust language for much of their development.

Jess has a blog: blog.jessfraz.com

Rust

Roger Linn (@roger_linn) gave us new ideas about musical instruments, detailing how wonderful expressive control, 3D buttons, and keyscanning can be.

Roger’s company is Roger Linn Design. We talked extensively about the LinnStrument, some about the AdrenaLinn for guitar, and only a little bit about the analog drum machine Tempest.

A key matrix circuit is a popular way to handle a large number of buttons but it falls prey to n-key rollover. Roger adds force sense resistors to this (FSR example at Sparkfun).

If you have an idea for an instrument, Roger has already written his response to your request for a prototype. Roger gave a keynote address at ADC '16 about the LinnStrument, including showing the sounds it can make.

OHMI Trust is the one handed musical instrument society enabling music making for everyone.

Roger mentioned some other expressive instruments including:

• Roli Seaboard

• Haken Continuum

• Madrona Labs Soundplane

• Eigenharp

Phoenix Perry (@phoenixperry) returns to speak with us about education and the importance of merging art and technology.

Phoenix’s website is phoenixperry.com. The art installation crossing the virtual and the physical world was called Forest Day Dream. Phoenix is teaching a free online class: Create Expressive Video Games.

Phoenix is the Master’s degree coordinator for University of the Arts London Creative Computing Institute.

Diversity and accessibility are important, some resources:

• FeministInternet.org

• We Are Not Users: Dialogues, Diversity, and Design

• Archaeologies of Touch: Interfacing with Haptics from Electricity by David Paris

• Critical Play: Radical Game Design by Mary Flanagan

• Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy by Cathy O'Neil

• Gone Home (Steam game)

• Her Story (Steam game)

• Bury me, my Love (Mobile game)

• #selfcare (Mobile game)

Phoenix was previously on Embedded 204: Abuse Electricity

Chris and Elecia talk about getting transcriptions, accessibility, operating systems, and networking.

Elecia recommends reading Haben by Haben Girma (@HabenGirma). 

Transcripts will initially be only available to Patreon supporters. To become a Patreon supporter, go to patreon.com/embedded. If you can’t be a supporter and still really want the transcripts, hit the contact link.

Chris Gammell’s nifty new podcast (video!) is Contextual Electronics. 

Want to know more about how operating systems work? Listeners recommended Miro Samek’s video series. 

Chris answered some questions about LISP networking. More information about the layers of the network can be found in the OSI model. The mobile focused LISP project that Chris worked on is now at openoverlayrouter.org and has pointers for more documentation and code.

Dan Zimmerman (@dmz) spoke with us about voting, voting machines, building trust in software, and transparency.

Dan works for Galois (https://galois.com/ , @galois) and Free and Fair (https://freeandfair.us/, @free_and_fair). He worked on the US Vote Foundation’s E2E-VIV Project on the Future of Voting. The artifacts from that project are on github: github.com/GaloisInc/e2eviv.

Dan (and Galois) worked with Microsoft on ElectionGaurd, a suite of tools to help make elections end-to-end verifiable,  The tools are open source: github.com/microsoft/electionguard

The Helios verifiable online election system is also open source: github.com/benadida/helios-server

We failed to talk about the DARPA SSITH and FETT programs but if you are still reading the show notes, they might be of interest. We also didn’t talk about the National Academies report on Securing the Vote.

In a surprising turn of tables, Christopher White (@stoneymonster) joins the show as a guest to talk about his career, burnout, and musical instruments. 

Christopher attended Harvey Mudd College for his undergrad mathematics degree then got a Master’s degree in physics at San Jose State University.

Some things he has worked on include:

• Multicast

• OSPF

• LISP

• OCT

His current band is 12ax7 (12ax7.fm). The outro music is a track called “Solstice”.

Kate Temkin (@ktemkin) explained USB: how to get started, general orientation, useful tools, and when you’d use it in embedded systems.

Kate’s website is ktemkin.com. She works at Great Scott Gadgets.

References for USB: 

• USB in a Nutshell 

• USB Complete by Jan Axelson

• USB Embedded Hosts: The Developer’s Guide by Jan Axelson

• USB Specification, Chapter 9: USB Device Framework

USB Stacks we talked about:

• TinyUSB from Adafruit

• Lufa

• Cortex libopencm3

• For the host side: libusb

Open Source VIDs are available from Openmoko and Pid.codes

Kate recently gave a talk about making USB accessible. Part of the talk was about Luna, an FPGA based USB multitool.

Some open source FPGA tools:

• Symbiflow.github.io

• Yosys: http://www.clifford.at/yosys/

Philana Benton (@TechnoPHILiANA) spoke with us about mentoring: how to be a good mentor, what to expect, and what not to do. 

If you’d like to try mentoring, sign up for Philana’s DivTekSpace (divtekspace.org). You can do a resume review, a mock interview, give career advice, and/or refer students to your company.

Philana’s home page is philanaaurelia.com

We also mentioned imentor.org

Joel Sherrill (JoelSherrill) spoke with us about choosing embedded operating systems and why open source RTEMS (RTEMS_OAR) is a good choice.

Embedded #307: Big While Loop: Chris and Elecia talk about when and where they’d use RTOSs

Embedded #93: Delicious Gumbo: Joel gave an introduction to the RTEMS RTOS

Joel works at OAR Corp (oarcorp.com) on RTEMS (rtems.org). RTEMS runs on many development boards including the BeagleBone, Raspberry Pi, and two FPGA boards: ARM ZYNQ-7000 and the Arty Board.

Joel recommends the operating systems book by Alan Burns and Andy Wellens. It comes in many flavors and editions including Real Time Systems and Programming Languages: Ada 95, Real-Time Java and Real-Time C/POSIX (3rd Edition).

NASA Core Flight System (https://cfs.gsfc.nasa.gov/)

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System (EPICS) (https://epics-controls.org/)

Jay Carlson (@jaydcarlson), author of The Amazing $1 Microcontroller, joined us to talk about comparing microcontrollers and determining our biases. This was an in-depth comparison of different micro features.

Jay is an electrical engineer specializing in electronics design and embedded programming (contact). His blog is new and interesting.

We talked to SEGGER’s Dirk Akeman about JLink on #218: Neutron Star of Dev Boards.

Matt Godbolt (@mattgodbolt) joined us to talk about assembly code, becoming a verb, 6502s, exploring compilers, and application binary interfaces.

Compiler Explorer can be found at godbolt.org. The code is on github (compiler-explorer/compiler-explorer). 

Matt also has jsbeeb, a BBC Micro (6502) simulator. You can try it out at bbc.godbolt.org. Its code and more information is on github (mattgodbolt/bbc-micro-emulation). Matt recently gave a video presentation about jsbeeb for ABUG. 

Some other videos that may be of interest:

• CppCon 2016: Jason Turner “Rich Code for Tiny Computers: A Simple Commodore 64 Game in C++17”

• Matt’s YouTube videos on using Compiler Explorer

• Just enough Assembly for Compiler Explorer - Anders Schau Knatten

• CppCon 2017: CB Bailey “Enough x86 Assembly to Be Dangerous”

• CppCon 2017: Carl Cook “When a Microsecond Is an Eternity: High Performance Trading Systems in C++”

The best compiler book seems to be The Dragon Book.

Hyrum’s Law on writing interfaces.

Application Binary Interface (ABI)

Bailey Steinfadt (@baileysteinfadt) spoke with us about the makerspaces, communities, following many paths, and misbehaving robots.

Bailey works at Dojo Five and Stone Path Engineering. 

Area 515 is a non-profit maker space in the Des Moines, Iowa area. They supported their local emergency services with over 6000 face shields. If you are looking for something to do with your 3d printer, look at One Shot Bias Tape Maker and the how to use it video.

Bailey recommended the Makers On Tap podcast and grill mats for soldering. Elecia recommended the You Can Do It!: The Merit Badge Handbook for Grown-Up Girls as a book she’s only picked up once in a bookstore years ago but has thought about as an excuse to pick up new skills.

Doug Harriman of Simplexity (@SimplexityPD) spoke with us about motors, controllers, and designing mechatronic systems.

Simplexity (or if you want to contact them)

Doug recommends Control Systems Engineering by Norman S. Nise. Elecia recommends Notes on Diffy Qs by Jiří Lebl from American Institute of Mathematics list of free and approved math textbooks. They both like the 3 Brown 1 Blue YouTube channel.

If you liked the part about how to choose a motor, you might want to watch Doug’s Webinar on DC Motors & Motion Control Systems (you’ll have to give your info to see it).