I am Elecia White alongside Christopher White. We’re here to chat about the interests, careers, and lives of engineers, artists, educators and makers. Our diverse guest list includes names you may have heard and engineers working quietly in the trenches. Either way, they are knowledgeable, enthusiastic, and inspiring.
We’d love to share our enthusiasm for science, technology, engineering, art, and math (STEAM).
The podcast Embedded is created by Logical Elegance. The podcast and the artwork on this page are embedded on this page using the public podcast feed (RSS).
Komathi Sundaram spoke with us about her enthusiasm for tests and test automation. We talked about the different joys of testing vs. development, setting up CI servers, and different kinds of tests including unit, hardware-in-the-loop, and simulation. It may sound dry but we had a lot of fun.
Komathi’s site is TheKomSea.com which hosts her blog as well as contact info. She will be speaking on automated hardware in the loop test processes at the Embedded Online Conference.
Nordic Semiconductor has been the driving force for Bluetooth Low Energy MCUs and wireless SoCs since the early 2010s, and they offer solutions for low-power Wi-Fi and global Cellular IoT as well. If you plan on developing robust and battery-operated applications, check out their hardware, software, tools, and services. On academy.nordicsemi.com, you’ll find Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and cellular IoT courses, and the Nordic DevZone community covers technical questions: devzone.nordicsemi.com. Oh, and don’t forget to enter Nordic Semiconductor’s giveaway contest! Just fill out the entrance form, and you're in the running. Good luck!
We spoke with Janet Hansen about the world of professional costumery (with electronics) and becoming an artist.
Janet’s business is Enlighted where you can find custom illuminated clothing as well as Janet’s ready-made art. Janet’s personal site is janethansen.com which is more focused on her artistic pursuits.
Janet mentioned Seeed’s MSGEQ7.
We talked about Janet’s light up pillow with Debra Ansell on 494: All Tech Is Wearable — Embedded.
If you’re interested in the intersection of neuroscience and engineering, you might want to check out what Mouser Electronics is doing with Brain-Computer Interfaces. It’s all about how you can control machines with your mind, and it’s one of the coolest areas of innovation right now. Mouser’s Empowering Innovation Together site has great content on BCIs, from videos to in-depth articles and podcasts that break down the tech. If this piques your curiosity, head over to Mouser.com/empowering-innovation and explore what’s happening with BCI and other exciting developments in the world of design and engineering.
At the end of this week’s show, Elecia reads a Winnie the Pooh poem as Cookie Monster death metal. Before that, Chris and Elecia chat about mental health, journaling, personal projects, and listener questions.
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You can also sign up for the Embedded newsletter. Maybe now with job postings?
Elecia’s journaling notebook is this one on JetPens (which is where she gets her nice pens and some of her stickers and washi tape).
From discussing some listener messages, we mentioned:
Matt Keeter’s talk on debuggability in production where you don’t have access to the system that is faulting (video and slides)
Letter boards (in the Adirondacks), see those in action here
Wokwi simulator is a great place to get more embedded experience without buying all the kits.
Christopher has said that there will not, definitely not, under any circumstances, be a whole death metal album of Winnie the Pooh poems. Elecia is practicing anyway.
Nordic Semiconductor has been the driving force for Bluetooth Low Energy MCUs and wireless SoCs since the early 2010s, and they offer solutions for low-power Wi-Fi and global Cellular IoT as well. If you plan on developing robust and battery-operated applications, check out their hardware, software, tools, and services. On academy.nordicsemi.com, you’ll find Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and cellular IoT courses, and the Nordic DevZone community covers technical questions: devzone.nordicsemi.com. Oh, and don’t forget to enter Nordic Semiconductor’s giveaway contest! Just fill out the entrance form, and you're in the running. Good luck!
OpenMV has a new Kickstarter so CEO Kwabena Agyeman chatted with us about more powerful (and smaller!) programmable cameras.
See OpenMV’s site for their existing cameras. See their (already funded!) kickstarter page for the super powerful N6 and the ridiculously small AE3.
Note that OpenMV still is committed to open source. See their github if you want to know more.
Edge AI is the idea of putting intelligence in the devices (instead of in the cloud). There is an advocacy and education foundation called Edge AI Foundation. This organization was formerly the TinyML Foundation. Edge Impulse and Roboflow are companies that aid in creating and training AI models that can be put on devices.
ARM talks about their Ethos-U55 NPU (and how to write software for it).
Professor Shimon Schocken spoke with us about teaching computer science from NAND logic gates to arithmetic units, micro assembly, virtual machines, compilers, operating systems, and the Tetris games. We also talk about good design, good interfaces, and good tests.
Shimon’s book is Elements of Computing Systems and the website with the course lecture notes, slides, videos, simulators, and everything you need is nand2tetris.org.
Shimon mentioned his work with teaching math, that is www.matific.com. You can find out more about Shimon’s other projects on his site shimonschocken.com (including his fascinating TED talk: The self-organizing computer course).
Shimon’s co-author is Noam Nisan who also wrote about understanding logic systems (look, anytime we can bring up Gödel's incompleteness theorems, we will).
We talked about Tim Bell’s CS Unplugged, teaching computer science concepts without a computer. It comes in Classic and Modern flavors.
Memfault is a leading embedded device observability platform that empowers teams to build better IoT products, faster. Its off-the-shelf solution is specifically designed for bandwidth-constrained devices, offering device performance and product analytics, debugging, and over-the-air capabilities. Trusted by leading brands such as Bose, Lyft, Logitech, Panasonic, and Augury, Memfault improves the reliability of devices across consumer electronics and mission-critical industries such as access control, point of sale, energy, and healthcare. To learn more, visit memfault.com.
Professor Cindy Harnett spoke to us about new and different sensors and actuators, primarily designed for soft robotics and fabricated with relatively low cost materials.
Cindy is a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Louisville where she runs the Harnett Lab.
The papers we discussed are here. You can find a longer list of Cindy’s papers on Google Scholar. The video of the SESAME actuator is especially interesting.
Nordic Semiconductor has been the driving force for Bluetooth Low Energy MCUs and wireless SoCs since the early 2010s, and they offer solutions for low-power Wi-Fi and global Cellular IoT as well. If you plan on developing robust and battery-operated applications, check out their hardware, software, tools, and services. On academy.nordicsemi.com, you’ll find Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and cellular IoT courses, and the Nordic DevZone community covers technical questions: devzone.nordicsemi.com. Oh, and don’t forget to enter Nordic Semiconductor’s giveaway contest! Just fill out the entrance form, and you're in the running. Good luck!
Debra Ansell joined us to talk about finding friends and exchanging neat gifts, accidentally tricking people into making unmanufacutable boards, and happy, blinking lights.
Debra is usually known by the moniker GeekMomProjects (also her website is geekmomprojects.com). She has been writing for Make Magazine.
Debra won one of the SuperCon badge add-on awards so her poseable Bendy SAO will be available at SuperCon Europe.
Some other things we mentioned:
Janet Hansen is on Mastodon and has an incredible Enlightened Designs wearables website.
#makergiftexchange on your favorite social media platform
And some upcoming events that promise to have lots of LEDs:
Teardown 2025 | Crowd Supply (Jun ‘25)
Portland Winter Light Festival (Feb ‘25)
Memfault is a leading embedded device observability platform that empowers teams to build better IoT products, faster. Its off-the-shelf solution is specifically designed for bandwidth-constrained devices, offering device performance and product analytics, debugging, and over-the-air capabilities. Trusted by leading brands such as Bose, Lyft, Logitech, Panasonic, and Augury, Memfault improves the reliability of devices across consumer electronics and mission-critical industries such as access control, point of sale, energy, and healthcare. To learn more, visit memfault.com.
Elecia and Chris talk with each other about the state of Chris’ mind, what makes an embedded developer stand out, “LEGO block” based design, unit tests, and astronomy. Whew!
Elecia was recently on the Changelog podcast, talking about the world of embedded systems.
Chris has been working with Micropython (we talked with Damien George about Micropython on episode 456). He’s using a Pyboard to start, but is looking to move on to this board from Sparkfun. Wikipedia has a nice reference on what the pulse-per-second signal is all about.
Elecia talked about her experience using CFFI to drive unit tests. She also talked about some facts from Information is Beautiful.
Chris’ telescope is the ZWO Seestar S50. There’s also a smaller Seestar S30 now which has a wider field-of-view.
Title reference (Chris and Elecia both thoroughly enjoyed The Good Place, the TV show this is taken from.)
Nordic Semiconductor has been the driving force for Bluetooth Low Energy MCUs and wireless SoCs since the early 2010s, and they offer solutions for low-power Wi-Fi and global Cellular IoT as well. If you plan on developing robust and battery-operated applications, check out their hardware, software, tools, and services. On academy.nordicsemi.com, you’ll find Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and cellular IoT courses, and the Nordic DevZone community covers technical questions: devzone.nordicsemi.com. Oh, and don’t forget to enter Nordic Semiconductor’s giveaway contest! Just fill out the entrance form, and you're in the running. Good luck!
Here’s one of the astrophotos Chris has taken:
The Horsehead and Flame nebulae in Orion taken from a Seestar S50
Nathan Jones chatted with us about his proposal for a computer architecture book based on a 4-bit computer.
Nathan found the 4-bit computer in the Hackaday SuperCon 2022 badge and was amazed by some of the ideas that folks implemented (see SuperCon Badge Hacking Awards Ceremony).
Nathan spoke at Hackaday SuperCon 2023 on the processor architecture, highlighting some of his ideas for a book. If you’d like to try your hand at the badge, find it on Nathan’s Voja4 Tindie page.
Nathan also spoke recently at the Embedded Online Conference (Building a Simple CLI, OOP in C, and The Power of a Look-up Table) and the Teardown Conference (Making Your Own MCU Boards and Building a Simple CLI).
If you have an idea you’d like to propose, check out O’Reilly’s proposal for a book or class. While you may not go with them, the proposal is a good place to get all of your ideas down.
We mentioned a few other computer architecture books as competitors for Nathan’s proposed book:
Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach by John L. Hennessy and David A. Patterson
Introduction to Computing Systems: From bits & gates to C & beyond by Yale N. Patt and Sanjay J. Patel
The Elements of Computing Systems, by Noam Nisan and Shimon Schocken (MIT Press) with supporting material and simulator on nand2tetris.
Nathan also did a survey of the Embedded Slack community. You can gain access by becoming a Patreon or Kofi supporter.
Chris and Elecia spoke with Kirk Pearson about running audio-electronic-art workshops, interesting sounds, and their book Make: Electronic Music from Scratch: A Beginner's Guide to Homegrown Audio Gizmos.
Find the book and a whole kit of parts on the Dogbotic Merch page. A few clicks from there you can find the Workshop List (don’t forget the coupon in the show audio).
We also mentioned The Thing (a sneaky listening device), Elliot Williams’ writing on CMOS synthesizers (a series called Logic-Noise) and the videos of Sebastian Tomczak (YouTube: littlescalemusic).
Memfault is a leading embedded device observability platform that empowers teams to build better IoT products, faster. Its off-the-shelf solution is specifically designed for bandwidth-constrained devices, offering device performance and product analytics, debugging, and over-the-air capabilities. Trusted by leading brands such as Bose, Lyft, Logitech, Panasonic, and Augury, Memfault improves the reliability of devices across consumer electronics and mission-critical industries such as access control, point of sale, energy, and healthcare. To learn more, visit memfault.com.
Nikolaus Correll spoke with us about robots, teaching robotics, and writing books about robots.
Nikolaus is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Colorado, see his lab website (or his Wikipedia page).
We discussed Nikolaus’ Introduction to Robotics with Webots Specialization Coursera course (or YouTube Playlist). These go along with his Introduction to Autonomous Robots (which can be compiled from source from github).
Masters of Computer Science online via University of Colorado and Georgia Tech.
While the Arcbotics Sparki is no longer in production, Nikolaus also mentioned the Amazon Racer.
Nordic Semiconductor has been the driving force for Bluetooth Low Energy MCUs and wireless SoCs since the early 2010s, and they offer solutions for low-power Wi-Fi and global Cellular IoT as well. If you plan on developing robust and battery-operated applications, check out their hardware, software, tools, and services. On academy.nordicsemi.com, you’ll find Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and cellular IoT courses, and the Nordic DevZone community covers technical questions: devzone.nordicsemi.com. Oh, and don’t forget to enter Nordic Semiconductor’s giveaway contest! Just fill out the entrance form, and you're in the running. Good luck!
Chris and Elecia discuss her origami art show, ponder PRs for solo developers, attempt to explain GDB debugging, and make a to-do list for getting rid of Kanga. Elecia is having an Origami Octopus Garden art show at the Aptos Public Library for the month of November, 2024. The postcard advertisement is below. There are more pictures on her Instagram (@elecia_white). The python tessellation generator is here.
Memfault’s Interrupt Debugging Firmware with GDB post is a much more considered explanation of GDB and includes pointers to other resources (including using Python with GDB). Transcript
Memfault is a leading embedded device observability platform that empowers teams to build better IoT products, faster. Its off-the-shelf solution is specifically designed for bandwidth-constrained devices, offering device performance and product analytics, debugging, and over-the-air capabilities. Trusted by leading brands such as Bose, Lyft, Logitech, Panasonic, and Augury, Memfault improves the reliability of devices across consumer electronics and mission-critical industries such as access control, point of sale, energy, and healthcare. To learn more, visit memfault.com.
Adrienne Braganza Tacke spoke with us about her book Looks Good To Me: Constructive Code Reviews. It is about how to make code reviews more useful, effective, and congenial.
Adrienne’s book is available now as an ebook at manning.com or a paper copy later in the year (Amazon link). Check out the example Team Working Agreement from Appendix A.
Adrienne’s personal website is adrienne.io.
Chris and Elecia chat about simulated robots, portents in the sky, the futility of making plans, and grad school.
A problem with mics led us to delay the show with Shimon Schoken from Nand2Tetris (co-author of Elements of The Elements of Computing Systems: Building a Modern Computer from First Principles). Look for that later in the year.
Elecia is playing with Webots, a robotics physics simulator. Simpler than ROS’s Gazebo, it also can run in an online mode where you can run it on a browser, selecting between many different robots.
Chris talked about processing his photos of Comet C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan–ATLAS) using PixInsight and Siril.
Then we talked about grad school (including Georgia Tech’s reasonably affordable CS Master’s Degree).
Tony sent in this insect detector: Mothbox. If you want links like this or de facto letters to the editor, please sign up for the Embedded.fm newsletter.
Photo of Comet C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan–ATLAS), taken from Seacliff Beach in Aptos, CA by Chris White
Antoine van Gelder spoke to us about making digital musical instruments, USB, and FPGAs.
Antoine works for Great Scott Gadgets, specifically on the Cynthion USB protocol analysis tool that can be used in conjunction with Python and GSG’s FaceDancer to act as a new USB device.
While bonding over MurderBot Diaries was a given, Antoine also mentioned NAND2Tetris which Elecia countered with The Elements of Computing Systems: Building a Modern Computer from First Principles, the book that covers the NAND2Tetris material.
Memfault is a leading embedded device observability platform that empowers teams to build better IoT products, faster. Its off-the-shelf solution is specifically designed for bandwidth-constrained devices, offering device performance and product analytics, debugging, and over-the-air capabilities. Trusted by leading brands such as Bose, Lyft, Logitech, Panasonic, and Augury, Memfault improves the reliability of devices across consumer electronics and mission-critical industries such as access control, point of sale, energy, and healthcare. To learn more, visit memfault.com.
Alan Blackwell spoke with us about the lurking dangers of large language models, the magical nature of artificial intelligence, and the future of interacting with computers.
Alan is the author of Moral Codes: Designing Alternatives to AI which you can read in its pre-book form here: https://moralcodes.pubpub.org/
Alan’s day job is as a Professor of Interdisciplinary Design in the Cambridge University department of Computer Science and Technology. See his research interests on his Cambridge University page.
(Also, given as homework in the newsletter, we didn’t directly discuss Jo Walton’s 'A Brief Backward History of Automated Eloquence', a playful history of automated text generation, written from a perspective in the year 2070.)
Chris and Elecia talk to each other about setting aside memory in a linker file, printing using your debugger, looking around a new code base, pointers as optimization, choosing processors, skill trees and merit badges.
Elecia’s Creating Chaos and Hard Faults talk and slides.
STM32 Application Note AN4989 microcontroller debug toolbox includes semihosting. Memfault’s Interrupt blog has a good Semihosting post.
Elecia and Steph’s Embedded Skills Tree. A far more detailed one pointed out by a listener: A comprehensive roadmap for aspiring Embedded Systems Engineers, featuring a curated list of learning resources.
The most influential book Elecia has never read is You Can Do It!: The Merit Badge Handbook for Grown-Up Girls.
Memfault is a leading embedded device observability platform that empowers teams to build better IoT products, faster. Its off-the-shelf solution is specifically designed for bandwidth-constrained devices, offering device performance and product analytics, debugging, and over-the-air capabilities. Trusted by leading brands such as Bose, Lyft, Logitech, Panasonic, and Augury, Memfault improves the reliability of devices across consumer electronics and mission-critical industries such as access control, point of sale, energy, and healthcare. To learn more, visit memfault.com.
Rick Altherr spoke with us about high-speed control, complicated systems, and making quantum computers.
If you want to know more about building quantum computers, take a listen to Rick’s MacroFab episode: The Nuts and Bolts of Quantum Computing.
If you want to make your own quantum circuit simulator, it only takes 27 lines of Python: A Quantum Circuit Simulator in 27 Lines of Python.
What about if you actually want to know about quantum computing? Rick suggests Quantum computing for the very curious while we look back at Embedded.fm 344: Superposition, Entanglement, and Interference with Kitty Yeung, talking about her Quantum Computing Comic book and Hackaday lecture series.
Rick works for IonQ where they do trapped-ion quantum computing (there are different physics methods for making ions dance to the tune of quantum computing).
If you want to talk to Rick, maybe to get his advice about your resume or career prospects, he sets aside a few hours each week to share his wisdom: https://calendly.com/mxshift
You can also find Rick on Mastodon and LinkedIn. He was also the guest on 311: Attack Other People's Refrigerators about security hacking and mentoring.
Professor Colleen Lewis joined us to talk teaching pointers with stuffies, explaining inheritance through tigers, and computer science pedagogy.
Check out her YouTube channel to view her videos explaining CS concepts with physical models. These are also collected on her website: Physical Models of Java.
If you are an instructor (or thinking about teaching CS), check out Colleen’s CS Teaching Tips. You may also be interested in some other research:
John Edwards Study on Syntax exercises in CS1
Daniel Willingham on why learning styles aren’t a real thing
Colleen is an Assistant Professor at University Illinois, Urbana-Champaign’s Siebel School of Computing and Data Science. You can find her papers on Google Scholar (including studies on teaching and learning).
Memfault is a leading embedded device observability platform that empowers teams to build better IoT products, faster. Its off-the-shelf solution is specifically designed for bandwidth-constrained devices, offering device performance and product analytics, debugging, and over-the-air capabilities. Trusted by leading brands such as Bose, Lyft, Logitech, Panasonic, and Augury, Memfault improves the reliability of devices across consumer electronics and mission-critical industries such as access control, point of sale, energy, and healthcare. To learn more, visit memfault.com.
Chris and Elecia talk about their current adventures in conference talks, play dates, and skunks.
Elecia’s talks are available on YouTube:
Creating Chaos and Hard Faults: An introduction to hard fault handlings, stack overflows, and debugging hard bugs
Introduction to Embedded Systems (O'Reilly Expert Webinar): An introductions to… well, embedded systems
These are both advertising for the 2nd edition of Elecia’s book, Making Embedded Systems: Design Patterns for Great Software. You can also find it on O’Reilly’s Learning System and probably read it with your 30 Day Trial (here).
Chris got a handheld game console, the Playdate (play.date), and has been writing a game for it. There is an interesting looking MicroPython port for it.
We also mentioned Tiny Tapeout Demoscene which sounds pretty neat. And KiCanvas where you can see KiCAD schematics without loading KiCAD.
Our newsletter has been off but will be back to normal next week. The RSS feed is probably not fun to look at but Elecia’s Rebloginator shows some Python tools for parsing feeds.
Neither the dog nor the skunk seem contrite.
Jerry Twomey spoke with us about his new O’Reilly book Applied Embedded Electronics which covers embedded topics such as EMI, signal processing, control systems and non-ideal components.
Jerry is also the principal engineer at Effective Electrons. His articles are linked from there and you can contact him via the site.
Here is a 30-day trial for the O’Reilly Learning System. You can take a look at Jerry’s Applied Embedded Electronics and Elecia’s Making Embedded Systems as well as hundreds of other books about software, hardware, engineering, and origami.
Carles Cufí spoke with us about Zephyr, Nordic, learning, open source development, and corporate goals.
Carles had some great suggestions for learning Zephyr:
Memfault Interrupt Practical Zephyr blog series
Zephyr’s Discord server
Zephyr’s YouTube channel (@ZephyrProject), sorted by views
Macrobatics term is from Zephyr Devicetree Mysteries, Solved - Marti Bolivar, Nordic Semiconductor
There is also the Zephyr website for a full picture. And various Nordic tutorials (see nRF5340 Audio applications).
Carles was an author on Getting Started with Bluetooth Low Energy: Tools and Techniques for Low-Power Networking. The cover animal is a mousebird.
Jan Rychter joined us to talk about building a company, electronic components, and software design.
Jan is the founder and engineer at PartsBox.com. If you are interested in the meta-analysis of the data, check out his article on the Top Ten Hobby Parts and the Electronic Component Database,
You can find out more about Jan through his website (jan.rychter.com), LinkedIn, or Mastodon.
Kwabena Agyeman joined Chris and Elecia to talk about optimization, cameras, machine learning, and vision systems.
Kwabena is the head of OpenMV (openmv.io), an open source and open hardware system that runs machine learning algorithms on vision data. It uses MicroPython as a development environment so getting started is easy.
Their github repositories are under github.com/openmv. You can find some of the SIMD details we talked about on the show:
150% faster: openmv/src/omv/imlib/binary.c
1000% faster: openmv/src/omv/imlib/filter.c
Double Pumping: openmv/src/omv/modules/py_tv.c
Kwabena has been creating a spreadsheet of different algorithms in camera frames per second (FPS) for Arm processors: Performance Benchmarks - Google Sheets. As time moves on, it will grow. Note: this is a link on the OpenMV website under About. When M55 stuff hits the market expect 4-8x speed gains.
The OpenMV YouTube channel is also a good place to get more information about the system (and vision algorithms).
Kwabena spoke with us about (the beginnings of) OpenMV on Embedded 212: You Are in Seaworld.
Elecia is giving a free talk for O'Reilly to advertise her Making Embedded Systems, 2nd Edition book. The talk will be an introduction to embedded systems, geared towards software engineers who are suddenly holding a device and want to program it. The talk is May 23, 2024 at 9:00 AM PDT. Sign up here. A video will be available afterward for folks who sign up.
Lee Wilkins joined Chris and Elecia to talk about The Open Source Hardware Association, the Open Hardware Summit, and zine culture.
The Open Source Hardware Association (OSHWA) provides certification and support for creating open source hardware. The Open Hardware Summit is happening May 3-4, 2024. It is in Montreal, Canada. It also has many online components including a Discord and online Unconferece. All videos are available for later watching on YouTube.
Lee’s personal page is leecyb.org. Their zines are available in their shop.
Elecia mentioned enjoying There Are No Electrons: Electronics for Earthlings by Kenn Amdahl.
Chris and Elecia talk about the Embedded Online Conference, their experience learning Zephyr, and some listener questions.
Elecia will be presenting on Creating Chaos and Hard Faults at the Embedded Online Conference, Apr 29 - May 3, 2024. Some other talks that look interesting:
Breaking Good: Why Virtual Hardware Prefers Rough Handling by Uri Shaked
Beyond Coding: Toward Software Development Expertise by Marian Petre
Use the EMBEDDEDFM coupon for a discount (or if your whole team is going, check out the group discounts).
Elecia’s book (Making Embedded Systems, 2nd Edition) is shipping (Amazon or Bookshop.org).
Zephyr is pretty amazing.
Logic gates and origami? Professor Inna Zakharevich joined us to talk about Turing complete origami crease patterns.
We started talking about Turing completeness which led to a Conway’s Game of Life-like 2D cellular automaton called Rule 110 (Wikipedia) which can be implemented with logic gates (AND, OR, NOT). These logic gates can be implemented as creases in paper (with the direction of the crease indicating 0 or 1).
The paper describing the proof is called Flat Origami is Turing Complete (arxiv and PDF). Quanta Magazine has a summary article: How to Build an Origami Computer.
Inna’s page at Cornell University also has the crease patterns for the logic gates (pdf).
Inna is an aficionado of the origami work by Satoshi Kamiya who creates complex and lifelike patterns.
Some other origami mentioned:
Origami Stegosaurus by John Montroll YouTube Folding video (Part 1 of 3)
Ilan Garibi’s Pineapple Tessellation (PDF instructions)
Eric Gjerde Spread Hex Origami Tessellation (This also has the equilateral triangle grid needed to fold Inna’s gate logic)
Amanda Ghassaei’s Origami Simulator (Mooser’s is under Examples->Origami)
Some other math mentioned:
Veritasium’s Math's Fundamental Flaw talks about Goerthe’s Incompleteness Theorem
Physical Logic Game: Turing Tumble - Build Marble-Powered Computers
Mathematics of Paper Folding (Wikipedia)
Philip Koopman joined us to talk about how modulo 255 vs 256 makes a huge difference in checksum error detection, how to get the most out of your checksum or CRC, and why understanding how they work is worth the effort.
Philip has recently published Understanding Checksums and Cyclic Redundancy Checks. He’s better known for Better Embedded System Software as well as his two books about safety and autonomous vehicles:
The UL 4600 Guidebook: What to Include in an Autonomous Vehicle Safety Case
How Safe Is Safe Enough?: Measuring and Predicting Autonomous Vehicle Safety
Phil’s YouTube page has a number of videos with great visuals to go along with his books. He also has three(!) blogs:
Checksum and CRC Central (including a post on checksum speed comparison)
Currently, Phil is a professor at Carnegie Mellon University (his page there). You can follow him on LinkedIn.
Elecia read (and give 2.5 stars to) Symmetry: A Journey into the Patterns of Nature by Marcus du Sautoy: “Interesting but uneven, I kept reading to find out what horrible things math profs do to their children in the name of fun. Worth it when I finally got to a small section with Claude Shannon (and Richard Hamming). It didn’t help with this podcast but it was neat.”
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.
Making Embedded Systems, 2nd Edition came out today! Chris and Elecia talk about the changes, the writing, but not the eldritch horror. Then we talk about pianos and origami.
The electronic version is available now on Amazon, ebooks.com, Google Play and where you get your ebooks. The paper copy will be out in about two weeks, you can preorder now. It is also available on the O’Reilly Learning System, here is a 30-day Trial.
See the Embedded.fm Origami and Flex PCBs newsletter, sign up for future newsletters here.
Memfault is hosting its first launch week of the year! On Tuesday, March 12th, Memfault CEO François Baldassari will showcase how to evaluate the health and performance of your embedded devices clearly within Memfault's observability platform. Join the webinar to discover how simple it is to monitor three necessary device measures: stability, battery, and connectivity. Register today!
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)).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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).
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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:
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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)
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Conferences and happenings:
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
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.
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
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).
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.)
Adafruit’s Liz Clark (BlitzCityDIY) spoke with us about MIDI, music, and tutorials.
Liz’s Adafruit Tutorials include
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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!)
Digipen.edu had two courses The Kid (and Svec) took. Both are free on YouTube:
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.
Chris and Elecia take an in-studio vacation, chatting about what they’ve been doing. A few technical topics came up, entirely unintentionally.
James Webb Space Telescope Pop-Up Card
Github Codespaces lets you try out some code bases
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
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
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:
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.
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.
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
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).
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:
See also A list of IoT platforms – Systev post mentioned in the show (also Building The Infinite Matrix Of Tamagotchis | Hackaday).
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).
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.
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:
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.
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
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).
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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
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.
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:
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:
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)
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.
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.
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:
Hacking a VW Golf Power Steering ECU - Part 1 – Willem Melshing's Blog
Instrument Cluster (ICM) Simulator: ICSim on github
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
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:
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
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.
Support us on Patreon!
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):
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
Want more interesting email?
ThePrepared is a weekly email about engineering, infrastructure, and manufacturing news
Elecia was interviewed by TheAnalog.io newsletter which is a weekly email about manufacturing and engineering
Embedded.fm has a weekly newsletter about topics related to the engineering focused podcast (and transcript)
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.
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
Embedded has:
A Patreon page where you can support us and get into the Slack community
A newsletter that sends you a weekly email about the show and little notes
Transcripts that you can use to look things up or follow along if the speakers are unclear
If you’d like to help the show grow, please write a review. Or share it with a friend. Or send it to your school’s Dean of Computer Science and/or Engineering and tell them it should be part of the curriculum to see what engineering lives and careers are like. Or send it to your company’s Director of New Hires and say it is important for techy folks to stay current and engaged in embedded systems.
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:
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
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.
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
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.
Some FPGA resource mentioned:
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
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
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:
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
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
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:
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.
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:
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:
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.
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2021 Embedded Online Conference is May 18-19 & 20, 2021
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.
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:
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
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.
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:
Linux on RISC-V with open hardware and open FPGA tools
Linaro Connect BoF: gpio and pinctrl in Linux kernel (Slides)
RISC-V: How an open ISA benefits hardware security (Slides)
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
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.
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).
More about the 4-bit Radio Shack computer (and an Arduino-based emulator for it!)
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
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
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:
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:
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:
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 Complete by Jan Axelson
USB Embedded Hosts: The Developer’s Guide by Jan Axelson
USB Stacks we talked about:
TinyUSB from Adafruit
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:
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”
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.
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).
Dr. Katy Huff (@katyhuff) spoke with us about nuclear engineering, effective software development, and the apropos command.
Katy wrote an O’Reilly book describing Python software development to scientists: Effective Computation in Physics: Field Guide to Research with Python. She has been involved with Software Carpentry.
Katy is a professor at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Department of Nuclear, Plasma, and Radiological Engineering. She uses Bell and Glasstone’s Nuclear Reactor Theory in her Nuclear Reactor Theory class.
Janelle Shane creates the AI Weirdness blog. (She was also a guest in #275: Don’t Do What the Computer Tells You.)
Chris Svec (@christophersvec) chatted with us about going from engineer to manager and working from home.
Chris had many book recommendations (these are affiliate links):
Absolutely Remarkable Thing by Hank Green (fiction)
Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel Pink
The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change by Camille Fournier
Resilient Management by Lara Hogan
The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering by Frederick P. Brooks Jr.
Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager by Michael Lopp
How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
Chris is hiring for his team. Check out the iRobot Jobs page or look at the specific jobs he’s hiring for (in Boston, MA): Associate Software Engineer and Principal Software Engineer.
Chris gave a talk to Purdue students about working from home, there is a video and a summary blog post.
An interesting tweet about the difference between working from home and what people are doing now. The Canadian Federal government gave the following advice:
Finally, Svec’s family wants a cat. They probably won’t get a Sphinx despite it matching all the criteria. Maybe an Abyssinian. Or maybe a dog.
Matt Godbolt (@mattgodbolt) spoke with us about settling arguments with Compiler Explorer.
Compiler Explorer comes in different flavors:
You can see the beta version by putting a beta on the end: https://gcc.godbolt.org/beta/
This a fully open source project. You can read the code and/or run your own version:
Matt works at DRW working on low latency software. Note that DRW is hiring for software engineers. You can read about the evolution of Compiler Explorer on their blog.
Matt’s personal blog is xania.org. You might like parts about 6502 Timings. He also has several conference talks on YouTube including x86 Internals for Fun & Profit and Emulating a 6502 in Javascript. Matt was previously at Argonaut Games.
Jason Turner of C++ Weekly and his C++17 Commodore 64
Could a Neuroscientist Understand a Microprocessor? paper (with a nod to Don’t Panic GeoCast’s Fun Paper Friday)
Kate Stewart (@_kate_stewart) of the Linux Foundation spoke with us about the Zephyr operating system (@ZephyrIoT).
Some Zephyr docs:
Two projects using Zephyr:
Open Artificial Pancreas System (openaps.org)
Zephyr on a Hearing Aid talk at Embedded Linux Conference 2019
Christopher (@stoneymonster) and Elecia (@logicalelegance) discuss listener questions about USB, thesis projects, prototype iterations, motivation, and processor cores.
Chris has been using audiomovers.com to mix audio remotely in real time.
Daniel Situnayake (@dansitu) spoke with us about machine learning on microcontrollers.
Dan is the author of TinyML: Machine Learning with TensorFlow Lite on Arduino and Ultra-Low-Power Microcontrollers. You can read the first several chapters at tinymlbook.com.
TinyML is a part of TensorFlow Lite. See the microcontroller getting started guide.
Dan works for Edge Impulse (@EdgeImpulse) which is making tools for easier machine learning integration at the edge. Their tools are free and they also have a getting started guide.
Dan recently posted on the Edge Impulse blog about training a TinyML model to capture lion roars.
For TinyML meetups and a forum, check out tinyml.org
Lacuna Space: low cost sensors transmitting to space
Erin Talvitie of Harvey Mudd College spoke with us about machine learning, hallucinating data, and making good decisions based on imperfect predictions.
Paper we discussed: Self-Correcting Models for Model-Based Reinforcement Learning
Erin’s grant: Using Imperfect Predictions to Make Good Decisions
For a reinforcement learning book, Erin suggests Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction by Richard S. Sutton and Andrew G. Barto or the lecture series by David Silver.
For a machine learning book, Elecia likes Hands-On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn, Keras, and TensorFlow: Concepts, Tools, and Techniques to Build Intelligent Systems by Aurélien Géron
John Saunders (@NYCCNC) spoke with us about building a Johnny Five robot on his NYC CNC YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/user/saunixcomp).
You can find all of the Johnny Five build videos on a playlist or check out the NYC CNC page. As mentioned, Input Inc did a lot of the preliminary work.
John recommends books:
John is also the founder of Saunders Machine Works (they have a contact page).
Adam Wolf (@adamwwolf) of Wayne and Layne (www.wayneandlayne.com) spoke with us about making kits, museum exhibit engineering, working on KiCad, and extraterrestrial art philosophy.
Adam has a personal blog on www.feelslikeburning.com/blog/ as well as a website adamwolf.org. Adam co-wrote Make: Lego and Arduino Projects
If you want to know how to contribute to KiCad libraries, check out their instruction page: kicad-pcb.org/libraries/contribute/
We also mentioned:
Evil Mad Scientist’s Guide to Improving Open Source Hardware Visual Diffs
KiCad Automation Tools: tools to autogenerate KiCad artifacts when committing to git
Kivy: open source Python library for making displays
Cedux: application framework
OKGo Upside Down and Inside Out video and Art in Space project
Professor Ayanna Howard of Georgia Tech joins us to talk about robotics including how androids interact with humans. Some of her favorite robot include the Darwin, the Nao, and, for home-hacking, the Darwin Mini.
Ayanna has a profile on EngineerGirl.org, a site that lets young women ask questions of women in the engineering profession.
Elecia has been working on a typing robot named Ty, documented on the Embedded.fm blog. It uses a MeArm, on sale in July 2017 at Hackaday.com, with coupon noted in show. (don't use PayPal to check out or you can't apply the coupon).
Other robots for trying out robots: Lego Mindstorms (lots of books, project ideas, and incredible online tutorials!), Cozmobot, Dash and Dot. Some robotics competition leagues include Vex, Botball, and FIRST.
Carmen Parisi spoke with us about changing jobs from a semiconductor specialist at TI to an electrical engineering generalist at Wasatch Photonics.
Carmen was previously on Embedded 216: Bavarian Folk Metal and formerly was the host of The Engineering Commons podcast
Carmen works at Wasatch Photonics making Ramen Spectrometers.
Ramiro Montes De Oca spoke with us about modular electronics, chiplets, and his company aThing.io
Project Tinkertoy (movie) is a 1953 US Navy project on automated manufacturing of modular electronics.
Ramiro mentioned his accelerator: CoFoundersLab Accelerator
Jason Derleth of the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts Program spoke with us about what it takes to win a NIAC award.
Key dates: Note: Solicitations open in June 2020!
We first heard about NIAC talking to Ariel Waldman. Her niacfellows.org site has some advice and encouragement for applying. Ariel was on Episode 255 of the show.
Elecia’s one-page overview of Curved-Crease Origami and Flex Circuitry for In-situ Planetary Science Sensor Arrays.
Chris Gammell (@Chris_Gammell) of The Amp Hour and Contextual Electronics joined Christopher and Elecia to talk about firmware, learning, and books.
Chris is the host of The Amp Hour, a podcast about electronics and electrical engineering. Chris is also the founder of Contextual Electronics, where you can go to learn how to create electronics. Chris has a long running blog called Analog Life, found on his webpage chrisgammell.com,
Chris is learning firmware as part of his consulting business. He likes Elecia’s Making Embedded Systems book.
KiCon is happening at CERN in September 2020. More information at 2020.kicad-kicon.com.
We talked about Jay Carlson who was on Embedded talking about his Amazing $1 Microcontroller project (#226) and about teaching embedded systems (#303)
We talked about book club books:
And a fun book series called Bobiverse (the Audible version is especially good).
(The outro music is Chris W.’s attempt to troll Chris G. with his “lightning” round answer)
Chris (@stoneymonster) and Elecia (@logicalelegance) chat about the year 2038, their projects, their new finds, and future shows.
The year 2038 problem is real. Elecia read some of this tweet thread about it.
Single file libraries list on github: (https://github.com/nothings/single_file_libs), including the STB image handling library Chris was originally looking for.
Chris is working on a MIDI project with a NUCLEO-144 (STM32F303ZE) board and various breakout boards from Adafruit and Sparkfun.
Elecia talked about the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts Program (NIAC) and curved crease origami. She also talked about PID controllers and Tiny ML.
Dennis Jackson spoke with us about making the career shift from software to embedded.
Dennis buys James Grenning’s Test Driven Development in Embedded C for his new hires and often recommends Elecia’s Making Embedded Systems. His tip that everyone should know was “Learn make!” and he has a reference for that: Why Use Make.
He suggested Joel Spolsky’s reading lists from Joel On Software, even the ones that don’t obviously apply.
Additional suggested-reading articles:
What every computer scientist should know about floating point arithmetic
The Power of Ten -- 10 Rules for Writing Safety Critical Code
In his previous appearance on Embedded (#94: Don’t Be Clever), we talked about code complexity and measuring cyclomatic complexity. At that time he wanted a tool to monitor the code’s status. He has since found one: pmccabe.
Darryl Yong (@dyong) is a mathematics professor at Harvey Mudd College (and former classmate of ours, also at HMC). He is working with HMC’s Clinic Program, putting real industry projects in front of teams of college students. He’s also teaching number theory to prison inmates and helping teachers in the chronically underfunded Los Angeles Unified School District.
Darryl writes about his career in education at Adventures in Teaching (profteacher.com). You can read about his experiences with the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program.
If you dig into the archives a bit (2009) you can read about teaching at a high school, for example adapting teaching to different students. What he took away led him to create Math for America Los Angeles, a non-profit organization dedicated to increasing the number of secondary school mathematics and computer science teacher leaders in the greater Los Angeles Area.
Darryl’s personal page (darrylyong.com) and his HMC page (math.hmc.edu/~dyong). Also, check out HMC’s Clinic Program page.
We were joined in the studio by the Evil Mad Scientists Lenore Edman (@1lenore) and Windell Oskay (@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.
Professor Barbara Liskov spoke with us about the Liskov substitution principle, data abstraction, software crisis, and winning a Turing Award.
See Professor Liskov’s page at MIT, including her incredible CV.
Chris and Elecia talk with each other about non-work activities including music, office rearrangement, and origami.
The Solarbotics Squid Hunting CearouSol Kit
Samson S-patch plus 48-Point Balanced Patchbay
EarthQuaker Devices Rainbow Machine V2 Polyphonic Pitch-shifting Modulator Pedal (with Magic knob)
Artelino is a Japanese print auction house
Mohit Bhoite (@MohitBhoite) 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
Donate to DigitalNest by the end of 2019 and get your donation matched! Thank you to the listener who is doing the match!
Robert J. Lang spoke with us about origami, art, math, and lasers.
Robert has many origami books, here is a subset:
Origami Design Secrets: Mathematical Methods for an Ancient Art (the one we talked about most, has the hummingbird crease pattern)
Twists, Tilings, and Tessellations: Mathematical Methods for Geometric Origami (his new one, a textbook!)
Origami in Action: Paper Toys That Fly, Flap, Gobble, and Inflate (not a theory book, just fun folds)
Origami Sea Life (not mentioned but probably the book Elecia will be getting next)
Robert’s website langorigami.com is full of neat goodies:
Origami design software including a pointer to the Origamizer by Tomohiro Tachi
Suggested other books:
Origami to Astonish and Amuse by Jeremy Shafer
Origamido has a number of books. Robert uses Origamido paper but it is unobtanium to most people. Unless you are in Maine.
(Note: book links are affiliate links, we get a little kickback if you buy from there.)
Chris and Elecia talked through how security holes can get explored on a fictional product.
Thanks to an Embedded listener who enjoyed hearing from Jacob Martinez about helping young adults have access to technology, we have a grant to match donations to DigitalNEST up to $2500. Donate here: give.digitalnest.org/embeddedfm
We talked through OWASP Top 10 Embedded Application Best Practices but OWASP Internet of Things and OWASP Mobile Security are also very useful.
GREAT explanation of buffer overflow attacks by Coen Goedegebure
Phoenix Perry (@phoenixperry) spoke with us about physical games. Phoenix is CTO of DoItKits (@DoItKits).
More about Phoenix:
Her site: PhoenixPerry.com
She enjoyed Obelisk Gate by NK Jemisin
Physical games are sometimes called Alt Ctrl such as at the Alt Ctrl Game Jam.
Phoenix co-founded Code Liberation with Catt Small, Nina Freeman, and Jane Friedhoff. “Code Liberation catalyzes the creation of digital games and creative technologies by women, nonbinary, femme, and girl-identifying people to diversify STEAM fields.” There is an 8-part workshop in London in Summer 2017 (more info).
Some other interesting people:
Helen Steer (http://doitkits.com/)
How to Get What You Want wearables site
I know you only read the show notes because you wanted this link: Velastat LessEMF has the supplies for ghost hunting!
Rick Altherr (@kc8apf) spoke with us about firmware security and mentoring.
Rick is a security researcher at Eclypsium. His personal website is kc8apf.net.
Rick’s deeply technical dive into reverse engineering car ECUs and FPGA bitstreams was on the Unnamed Reverse Engineering Podcast, episode 24. He also spoke with Chris Gammell The Amp Hour 357 about monitoring servers, many many servers.
Firmware security links:
Elecia’s Device Security Checklist (wasn’t mentioned)
Thank you to our Embedded Patreon supporters, particularly to our corporate patron, InterWorking Labs (iwl.com).
Aimee Lucido (@AimeeLucido) is a software engineer and children’s book author. Her first book is Emmy in the Key of Code about music, learning to code, and fitting in. We spoke with Aimee about writing, programming, publishing, and putting beautiful words together.
You can get a copy of Emmy in the Key of Code from Booksmith, IndieBound, Barnes & Noble, Target, or Amazon. The music playlist can be found in Google Play or Spotify.
Aimee’s website is aimeelucido.com. She also writes crossword puzzles for American Values Club and New Yorker.
Some other authors and books we talked about:
The Crossover by Kwame Alexander
The Red Pencil by Andrea Davis Pinkney, illustrated by Shane W. Evans
After the show, I asked Aimee about resources for learning to read as a writer, she suggested looking at the KidLit Craft Blog.
Thank you to our Embedded Patreon supporters, particularly to our corporate patreon, InterWorking Labs (iwl.com).
Pete Staples of Blue Clover Devices (bcdevices.com, @theiotodm) spoke with us about tools for manufacturing hardware.
Some posts and products from Blue Clover Devices:
How to write PLT Board Test Plans (using YAML)
Behind the scenes at factories:
Thank you to our Embedded Patreon supporters, particularly to our corporate patron, InterWorking Labs (iwl.com).
Jacob Martinez (@jacobotech) spoke with Elecia about DigitalNEST (@DigiNEST), a non-profit devoted to giving high school and college age students access to technology, job training, and career development. DigialNEST is based in the agricultural communities of Salinas and Watsonville, CA.
Students who work through the course tracks at DigitalNEST can be invited to join the BizzNEST consulting group.
The conference we spoke of was NEST Flight (nestflight.org), held in September in Watsonville.
DigitalNEST is a non-profit and is accepting individual and corporate donations: digitalnest.org/donate/.
Chris and Elecia explain when and why to use an operating system on a microcontroller (real-time or not).
Thank you to our Embedded Patreon supporters, particularly to our corporate patreon, InterWorking Labs (iwl.com).
Dr. Loretta Cheeks (@loretta_cheeks) spoke with us about implicit bias in text, machine learning, getting a PhD, and STEAM outreach via Strong Ties (strongtiesaz.org).
Also see:
Loretta’s research on identifying implicit bias (The thumbnail image is from her work.)
Lotetta’s TEDx talk on AI and remembering
Thank you to our Embedded Patreon supporters for Loretta’s mic, particularly to our corporate sponsor, InterWorking Labs (iwl.com).
Amanda “w0z” Wozniak (@kainzowa) 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.
What do you get when you connect the open-source reverse engineer of Valve’s Steam Controller and the main electrical engineer of said device?
Jeff Keyzer (@mightyohm) and Gregory Gluszek (@greggersaurus) join us to talk about building and taking apart devices.
Greg’s project is on github as the OpenSteamController. He used pinkySim, an ARM simulator.
Jeff has left Valve and is now a freelance engineer as well as selling kits on mightyohm.com. The incredibly useful comic on how to solder lives there: mightyohm.com/soldercomic
I-Opener was the computer discussed.
Jay Carlson (@jaydcarlson) is back on the show to discuss education and the techniques he’s using to teach embedded systems.
Jay has some great posts on his jaycarlson.net blog. The one related to this show was entitled “How I Teach Embedded Systems.” Jay was also on Embedded 226: Camp AVR Vs. Camp Microchip where we discussed his fantastic survey of micros in The Amazing $1 Microcontroller. We also mentioned one of his recent posts about 3 cent micros.
Teaching has many different approaches. We talked about Bloom’s taxonomy and mentioned the Dreyfus model of skill acquisition.
Jen Costillo (@rebelbotjen) joins Elecia and Christopher to discuss their experiences interviewing (both as interviewer and interviewee).
Elecia did an hour long webinar on how to conduct technical interviews. In this show, she mentions a good post-interview ratings system.
Google discovered that their brainteasers are not a very effective way to interview.
Despite the news that swearing is good for you, we tried to bleep everything.
Also, it is minesweeper, not minefield. What were we thinking? It was obviously all Christopher’s fault. Though we should have stood up to him.
Elecia's book has more interview questions but from the perspective of how do you ask a question and what do you look for in a response.
Christopher interviews an embedded systems engineer with ~25 years of experience across medical, scientific, industrial and consumer products. He asks about career trajectory, field stories, and assorted destruction.
Making Embedded Systems: Design Patterns for Great Software
Tony’s show about Kalman Filters was 43: A Lot of High-Falutin’ Math
Carter Frost spoke with us about the Cabrillo College Robotics club and winning the 2019 NASA Swarmathon.
Cabrillo has many student clubs. Cabrillo Robotics has a Facebook page and is @CabrilloRobotic on Twitter.
The club gets its funding from the Cabrillo Foundation (to donate, make sure to note “Cabrillo Robotics Club” in your contribution).
Please RSVP for the Embedded 300 party on Eventbrite.com.
Christopher and Elecia talk about the upcoming Embedded 300 party (Sept 7th!), podcasting, and listener emails.
Please RSVP for the party. If you didn’t hear the link in the show or don’t recall it, contact us. Thank you to iRobot for sending us Root Robots as prizes!
We send the Samson Meteor as our guest mic.
Thank you for listening!
Monk Eastman (@MonkFunkster) joined us for an enlightening conversation about hardware compliance engineering. We covered the basics of CE, FCC, UL, and battery certification.
We mentioned that Alan Cohen’s Prototype to Product: A Practical Guide for Getting to Market has a good overview of certification. Alan was on Embedded 269: Ultra-Precise Death Ray.
For a deeper view of compliance engineer, Monk suggested this book: Electrical Product Compliance and Safety Engineering.
Listener Skippy wrote about his experience with CE certification.
Monk plays bass saxophone in the East Bay Brass Band.
Details on registering for the Embedded 300 party on Eventbrite.com are in the show itself.
Eric Brunning (@deeplycloudy) returns to talk about doing science in the field in this crossover episode with the Don’t Panic GeoCast’s John Leeman (@geo_leeman).
Eric is a Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at Texas Tech University specializing in storm electrification and lightning. We spoke with Eric on 268: Cakepan Interferometry about lightning and using baking goods as measurement devices. Eric was also on GeoCast 134: Launching Balloons out of a UHaul.
We spoke with John about his Phd research in 169: Sit on Top of a Volcano. The previous Don’t Panic GeoCast crossover was with John and Sridhar Anandakrishnan in 206: Crushing Amounts of Snow. John’s company is Leeman Geophysical.
The paper was Reconstructing David Huffman’s Legacy in Curved-Crease Folding by Erik D. Demaine, Martin L. Demaine and Duks Koschitz. Elecia is working her way through Erik Demaine’s Phd thesis on the same topic as well as Jun Mitani’s excellent book Curved-Folding Origami Design. Geology also has folds.
For 3D printed origami, Eric mentioned Henny Seggerman’s twitter @henryseg.
Chris Svec (@christophersvec) spoke to us about how hope can improve our software and work environments.
Chris is the author of Embedded Software Engineering 101 blog and has been on the show several times since his first appearance in 78: Happy Cows.
He mentioned Seth Godin’s Three Wishes post. We talked attentional focus and passing basketballs.
Details for the Embedded Cats and Hacks party are in the show. If you can’t attend, well, maybe you can still get a mug (zazzle). If you can attend, iRobot has graciously given us a couple Root robots that we’ll be giving away.
Shruthi Jaganathan spoke with us about recycling, machine learning, and the Jetson Nano (@NVIDIAEmbedded).
More about the Green Machine, the computer vision, machine learning, augmented reality way to sort your lunch leavings. The code is available. The system was on a Jetson TX2 developer kit and Shruthi has been moving it to the physically smaller and only $99 Jetson Nano developer kit (buy).
Shruthi has been getting into AI with the Jetson Two Days to a Demo as well as NVIDIA’s free Getting Started with AI on the Jetson Nano online course.
For more information about FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC), we talked about it with Derek Fronek on Embedded 257: Small Parts Flew Everywhere.
This week we talk about CircuitPython (@CircuitPython) with @adafruit’s Kattni Rembor (@kattni) and Scott Shawcroft (@tannewt).
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.
Mike Harrison (@mikelectricstuf) 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
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.
Mike will be at 2019 Hackaday SuperCon!
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.
Christopher (@stoneymonster) and Elecia (@logicalelegance) babble about their current projects involving ants, guitars, machine learning, and party planning.
Some tweet threads about our tour of Santa Cruz Guitar Company.
Elecia has been reading Hands-On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn, Keras, and TensorFlow by Aurélien Géron. While the 2nd edition preview is on O’Reilly’s electronic library (formerly Safari Online), it will be available via Amazon on July 5th. Or pick up the first edition.
Phillip Johnston of Embedded Artistry (290: Rule of Thumbs) is looking for blog posts, exchanging editing and exposure for posts that make sense on the site. Contact him with a topic idea before jumping in. For the Embedded blog, related to the show with Phillip, Elecia wrote a post about learning to give feedback.
Listener Brian asked about a CS degree for going into firmware. We mentioned our show with Dennis Jackson (211: 4 Weeks, 3 Days).
Listener Craig asked about PICs. We suggested taking a look at Jay Carlson’s Amazing $1 Microcontroller. We talked to Jay in 226: Camp AVR vs. Camp Microchip.
Listener Happyday asked about UL testing. We added FCC testing then asked if any of you could help us. Hit the contact link on Embedded.fm.
Embedded has a Patreon. There are new sponsorship levels! Nothing has changed though.
Karl Auerbach of InterWorking Labs spoke with us about how the internet works.
We talked about domain name services (DNS being the primary one), registries and registrars, domain thieves, and the History of the Internet project.
Karl runs his own (non-DNS) domain name service on his site www.cavebear.com. The site also includes notes from his time on the ICANN board (such as this one where they talk about redemption periods).
We spoke with Phillip Johnston (@mbeddedartistry) of Embedded Artistry about embedded consulting, writing about software, and ways to improve development.
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:
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
Alicia Gibb (@pipix) joined Elecia to talk about open source hardware, the OSHW association (@ohsummit), using trademarks for quality control, and light-up LEGO blocks.
Alicia is the editor and author of Building Open Source Hardware: DIY Manufacturing for Hackers and Makers. It is a handy resource for any manufacturing.
Alicia is the director of the Blow Things Up Lab, part of the Atlas Institute at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Light up LEGO blocks are available at Build Upons.
The LilyPad Arduino has many sewable electronics components.
You can find more talks and hacks on Alicia’s personal site, aliciagibb.com.
Christopher (@stoneymonster) and Elecia (@logicalelegance) discuss embedded systems education and project documentation.
Elecia wrote about her love of notebooks on the https://www.embedded.fm/blog-index.
yEd, for when you don’t have Visio. Asciiflow.com, for when you don’t have yEd (or you want to put diagrams in your comments)
We talked about many different documents and tried to note design vs implementation, product vs engineering vs user, and why we wanted them. We didn’t mention mechanical things because, ya know, software engineers. Some documentation we mentioned:
Product documentation
Schematics with block diagrams and comments. Also a GPIO to function spreadsheet.
UI flow when the system has a screens (Balsamiq for wireframe testing UIs)
SW spec and design doc: what do we plan to build and what are the tricky parts
SW configuration and SW developer docs: how to rebuild the computer that can build the code from scratch, also notes on debugging methodology
User manual: Usually not written by SW but may need SW’s patient input
Code comments: Functions and files get 5Ws: who, what, why, when, where, and how.
Who should call this?
What will its effect be? (“What will it do” but not in line by line detail!)
How does it work?
Why does it work this way?
When should it be called?
Where are its parameters? (“What” works here too but “where” is nice to remind you to check your memory assumptions.)
Repository checkin comments
Manufacturing docs and tests docs
Adafruit and Sparkfun both write good documentation, writing to users about how to use their code. Elecia likes Adafruit’s sensor library as a good set of code to review (including how much is in their docs vs their code).
Crossing machine intelligence, robotics, and medicine, Patrick Pilarski (@patrickpilarski) is working on smart prosthetic limbs.
Build your own learning robot references: Weka Data Mining Software in Java for getting to know your data, OpenIA Gym for understanding reinforcement learning algorithms, Robotis Servos for the robot (AX is the lower priced line), and five lines of code:
Patrick even made us a file (with comments and everything!).
Once done, you can enter the Cybathlon. (Or check out a look at Cybathlon 2016 coverage.)
Machine Man by Max Barry
Snow Country by Bokushi Suzuki
Aimee Mullins and her many amazing legs (TED Talk)
Patrick is a professor at University of Alberta, though a lot more than that: he is the Canada Research Chair in Machine Intelligence for Rehabilitation at the University of Alberta, and Assistant Professor in the Division of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, and a principal investigator with both the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii) and the Reinforcement Learning and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (RLAI). See his TED talk: Intelligent Artificial Limbs.
Kate Compton (@GalaxyKate) spoke with us about casual creators, Twitter bots done cheap and quick, and the creativity that is within each of us.
Kate’s website is galaxykate.com. Her Phd dissertation defense is interesting, see it on youtube.com. She is joining UCSC’s CROSS to do more work on casual creators and open source software. (We talked to Carlos Maltzan, the head of CROSS in 285: A Chicken Getting to the Other Side.)
Tracery is an open source story generator using a specific grammar. One example is at Kate’s BrightSpiral.com which creates a whole story every time you refresh.
You can use Tracery to make Twitter bots via CheapBotsDoneQuick.com. They are often text (@infinite_scream, @str_voyage, @DUNSONnDRAGGAN) or emoji based (@choochoobot, @infinitedeserts). However, Tracery and CBDQ can be used to create SVG images (such as @softlandscapes).
Elecia’s text bot is @pajamaswithfeet. It tweets (usually) kind things you can (sometimes) say to other people (or yourself).
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.
Some FPGA resource mentioned:
MyHdl.org (Python!)
Carlos Maltzahn joined us to talk about graduate studies in open source software, research incubators, and how software development tools can be used to aid the reproduction of scientific results.
Carlos is the founder and director of the Center for Research in Open Source Software (CROSS). He is also an adjunct professor of computer science and engineering at UC Santa Cruz.
Some projects we spoke about:
Jeff LeFevre — Skyhook: using programmable storage in Ceph to make Postgres and other databases more scalable and elastic (skyhookdm.com)
Ivo Jimenez — Black Swan: using DevOps techniques and strategies to speed up the systems research delivery life cycle (falsifiable.us)
Kate Compton — Tracery2 and Chancery: using open source software to support artists and poets (tracery.io)
Ori Bernstein (@oribernstein) joined us to talk about the dielectric constants of foods, reflective energy steering, and smart microwaves. Elecia got a little silly.
Ori works at Level Hot Pantry for more about the smart microwave, check out his !!ConWest talk. Ori has a github and personal site.
EMSL papadum testing (where our thumbnail came from, with permission)
Jennifer Wang (@jenbuilds) spoke with us about machine learning, magic wands, and getting into hardware.
For more detail about her magic wand build, you can see Jen’s Hackaday SuperCon talk or her !!ConWest talk. The github repo is well documented with pointers to slides from her SuperCon talk and an HTML version of her Jupyter notebook.
Check out this good introduction to machine learning from scikit-learn. It was their choosing the right estimator infographic we were looking at. (Elecia has bookmarked this list of machine learning cheat sheets.)
Jennifer’s personal sites are jenbuilds.com and jewang.net. She recommends the Recurse Center and wrote a blog post on her experience there.
We spoke with Laughlin Barker of OpenROV (@OpenROV) about underwater drones, underwater navigation, underwater exploration of the Antarctic, and extraordinarily large (underwater) jellyfish.
Watch this video of a Trident ROV being eaten by a shark… yes, you get to see the inside of a shark.
S.E.E. Initiative: Science Exploration Education from National Geographic
Laughlin left us with a coupon code for the Trident ROV. Please remember to invite us along on your ROV’ing.
Combining a love of engineering with a love of words, Jenny List (@Jenny_Alto) is a contributing editor at Hackaday (@Hackaday).
Jenny’s writing at Hackaday including Debunking the Drone Versus Plane Hysteria and Ooops, Did We Just Close An Airport Over a UFO Sighting?
Previously Jenny worked for Oxford English Press working on computational linguistics software. While there she wrote post about the word “hacker”.
Elecia has been secretly dreaming of being a lexicographer since reading Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries by Kory Stamper.
Chris (@stoneymonster) and Elecia (@logicalelegance) talk about design patterns, conferences, and Molotov cocktails.
Observer aka subscriber/publisher (caveat)
Delegation and Dependency Injection
Model View Controller (very important if somewhat dated UI pattern)
PyFlakes is a static Python checker
KiCAD Conference is in Chicago on April 26-27, 2019
BangBangConWest 2019 is over but the videos will be up soon including the one Elecia noted about liking things (which was done by Lynn Cyrin).
Valve's Alan Yates (@vk2zay) spoke with us about the science and technology of virtual reality.
Elecia looked at the iFixIt Teardown of the HTC Vive system as she was unwilling to take apart Christopher's system.
Alan shared some of his other favorite reverse engineering efforts: Doc OK’s Lighthouse videos, documentation on github by nairol, and a blog by Trammell Hudson.
Alan's sensor circuit diagrams were on twitter: SparkleTree sensor circuit (think simplified) and the closer-to-production Lighthouse sensor.
Make Magazine talked about Valve's R&D Lab. This is important in case you want to work at Valve (they are currently hiring for EE but if that doesn't describe you and you want to work there, apply anyway).
Alan also has a website (vk2zay.net) though it doesn't see much updating right now.
Patrick Yeon (@patyeon) spoke with us about nonprofit spaceships then asked our opinions about embedded software.
Pat is working for something something nonprofit space something something. To fill in some of the blanks, apply for a job on NonprofitSpaceship.org.
Pat was previously on episode 153: Space Nerf Gun when we talked about cost-optimized satellites.
We talked about several books:
Turn the Ship Around! A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders by L. David Marquet
Managers Path: Leaders Navigating Growth and Change by Camille Fournier
Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software by Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissides
Head First Design Patterns: A Brain-Friendly Guide by Eric Freeman, Elisabeth Robson, Bert Bates, Kathy Sierra
Elecia’s command code is on github.
Matthew Liberty (@mliberty1) 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.
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.
Jie Qi (@qijie) spoke with us about making paper-based electronics (@Chibitronics) and learning about patent law (via @Patentpandas).
Jie Qi is the founder of Chibitronics, a crafting electronics platform that uses paper and stickers to create (and teach) circuits. Building the company and working on electronics-filled pop-up books led to the realization that patent law does apply to open source maker-type companies. She started PatentPandas.org to share what she’s learned.
Jie is not the only one who has had issues with big companies patenting their open source work. We mentioned Jarek Duda and his fight to keep his compression algorithm unburdened by patents.
If you are having or wondering about having an issue, Patent Pandas is intended to be an amusing and gentle introduction. If you are looking for prior art, you can look at the Prior Art Archive and Patents.StackExchange. (If you have some free time, there are often requests to find prior art.)
If you are a maker wanting to ensure that your work has dated prior art, submit it to the Wayback machine (Archive.org).
Jesse Rutherford (@BentTronics) gave us an in-depth look at the 555 timer IC (wiki).
Jesse runs Bent-tronics.com and wrote The Ultimate Beginner's Guide to the 555 Timer (Amazon).
Some great 555 projects:
555 found in a drill trigger speed controller as seen on the Ben Heck Show
555 found inside a solar charger controller, video by Julian Ilett
Somehow, despite it being in the plan, we didn’t mention the Evil Mad Scientist The Three Fives Kit: A Discrete 555 Timer which builds a 555 Timer out of discrete parts. If only the creator would come on to talk about it and his other cool projects. Note that EMS also has a great description of how the 555 timer works.
The giveaway is Jesse’s book and the components to build the projects in his book.
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 upcoming book is You Look Like a Thing and I Love You. Sign up for her newsletter to be the first to order it (as well as getting the PG-13 versions of her hilarious AI outputs).
Ivan Kravets (@ikravets) spoke with us about PlatformIO (@PlatformIO_Org), IDEs, embedded libraries, and RISC-V.
PlatformIO is an editor, an integrated development environment with debugging and unit testing, and/or a library index. Its goal is to make embedded development easier and more consistent across host operating systems and development hardware. It is also a .org because the goal is to make all of this open source and free to engineers.
Ivan Kravets is the founder of PlatformIO.org. Personal site, Github, LinkedIn, and a neat interview. He recommends seeing the Dnieper River if you are in his area.
Ivan recently attended the RISC-V Summit. RISC-V is an open source processor core (like ARM but open source). SiFive was mentioned as one of the RISC-V processor vendors. RISC-V is being used extensively in research. Western Digital is planning to develop RISC-V based controllers. And MIPS recently joined RISC-V.
Chris and Elecia chat with each other about the new year. All is fine until she starts quizzing him about some language details of his new project.
Many object-oriented resources suggest using composition (has-a) over inheritance (is-a-type-of) (wiki). Where do swift extensions fit in? It seems to me (Elecia here) that extension is invisible composition that allows adding of functions.
For example, say you want a TiltSensor and you already have an ImuSensor object so you need to add a function for TiltComputation.
You could make the TiltSensor contain an ImuSensor (composition). You call the ImuSensor functions to check the readings when running TiltComputation function. You don’t need to know what is in ImuSensor, only what the API is.
You could have TiltSensor be a child class of ImuSensor (inheritance) so that TiltSensor responds to all ImuSensor functions as well as its new TiltComputation function. You could use the variables in ImuSensor directly for TiltCompulation but you will need to know what is in ImuSensor for that to work.
Or, in Swift, you could have TiltSensor be an extension of ImuSensor. Except it wouldn’t be called TiltSensor, it would be part of ImuSensor: any file that had access to your extensions would be able to create an ImuSensor instance and call TiltComputation as if it was part of the original ImuSensor API. The TiltComputation function would only have access to its extension’s variables and ImuSensor’s API. You get to add new functionality without breaking backward compatibility.
Some more resources on this topic:
Swift Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide by Matthew Mathias and John Gallagher
iOS Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide by Christian Keur and Aaron Hillegass
Blender Beta with EEVEE renderer
The Clean Coder: A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers by Robert C. Martin
Code Complete: A Practical Handbook of Software Construction by Steve McConnell
Gelly Roll Glitter Pens (by Sakura)
Google Podcast Link (or see the Subscribe page)
Chris Gammell (@Chris_Gammell) of The Amp Hour (@TheAmpHour) joined us to talk about the state of the industry, listeners, guests, and life in general.
Embedded’s accounting episode (150: Sad Country Song)
Contextual Electronics Consulting forum (requires you to apply)
Remote work
Excellent video on how prototype PCBs have improved over the years
Quickly falling cost of dev boards
Elecia worked on learning and building robots and happily got a related job
Chris W is building IOS apps
Object oriented
Prototype to Product: A Practical Guide for Getting to Market by Alan Cohen (Emebdded.fm interview)
Visual Basic as a prototyping language
ESP32 and EXP8266 longevity and use in products
WiFi provisioning
Azure IoT Hub, AWS IoT, Google Cloud Iot, Ubidots, and IoT App Story (the one Chris G remembered later)
Genuine People Personality (from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)
Genuine people personalities are coming to our gadgets (ArsTechnica)
LoRA and chuckable sensors
Telepresence and mirroring others
The Amp Hour ToorCamp episodes
Sourdough (a novel about robotics and AI) and Embedded’s interview with the author
Energy and Civilization: A History by Vaclav Smil
Jeri Ellsworth spoke about the demise of CarstAR in The Amp Hour 394
The Stone Monsters music products
Supporting Embedded Patreon leads to a link to their slack channel, mentioned in this show. Supporting The Amp Hour Patreon is also a great idea.
Alex Glow (@glowascii) 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.
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:
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.
James Grenning (@jwgrenning) joined us to talk about Test Driven Development, dealing with legacy code, and cleaning out very large pipes.
James is the author of Test Driven Development for Embedded C. If you want to take his live online course, check out the remote delivered TDD classes on Wingman Software. His blog has many great articles including TDD How-to: Get Your Legacy C into a Test Harness and TDD Guided by ZOMBIES.
Book: Working Effectively with Legacy Code by Michael Feathers
James mentioned Given-When-Then, a testing design pattern (brief intro). Kent Beck also wrote about test && commit || revert style testing.
James and Bob Martin present IoT implementation strategies in a series of videos on Clean Coders. James mentioned working with a Synapse Wireless radio.
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
Christopher White resurrects an Apple ][+ with his brother Matthew White. This is a show about the software Christopher and Matthew wrote when they were kids and the hardware they wrote it on.
Matthew's favorite fictional robot (we should have asked): Venus Probe from Six Million Dollar Man. We did ask about his favorite fictional computer and there is a video for that too.
Eric Schlaepfer's Monster 6502
Kerbal Space Program for the Apple ][
Elecia got to $42 in Lemonade Stand by the end of the show
Matthew's Nebula Wars and Eye of Eternal Death BASIC games circa 1982 and 1981 respectively.
If you feel like it, you can try out an Apple ][ in your web browser, with tons of disks available at the Internet Archive or in a Javascript Emulator.
Elecia's book is Making Embedded Systems.
After many bouts of lightning round, we finally got our lightning questions answered by Eric Brunning (@deeplycloudy). Eric is a Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at Texas Tech University specializing in storm electrification and lightning .
You can hear some of Eric’s field adventures by listening to his episode of the Don’t Panic Geocast show.
The Wikipedia page for lightning will lead you down many strange pathways. Though the Wikipedia Lightning Energy Harvesting page may convince you that it isn’t feasible (though some math might as well, as discussed on this show).
For more about lightning interferometry, check out Michael Stock’s in-depth site.
You can hear lightning on Jupiter if you listen to the right bands.
Neat video of the Milky Way in radio waves reflecting off the moon
Elecia really enjoyed The Cloudspotter’s Guide by Gavin Pretor-Pinney.
Lindsey Kuper (@lindsey) spoke with us about !!Con West, being a new professor, and reading technical journals.
The call for speakers for !!Con West is open until November 30, 2018. The conference will be in Santa Cruz, CA on February 23-24.
Lindsey’s blog is Composition.al and it has advice for !!Con proposals, advice for potential grad students, and updates on Lindsay’s work.
The Banana Slug is the UCSC mascot.
Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System by Leslie Lamport, 1978
Chris (@stoneymonster) and Elecia (@logicalelegance) talk about conferences, simulations, and future episodes.
Simulation/Emulation: QEMU and Renode. Chris also noted there were QEMU for STM32 instances such as this one from beckus.
For conferences, we named several but had no particularly useful advice. We did recommend classes such as James Grenning’s training on TDD in Embedded Systems and Jack Ganssle’s Better Firmware Faster.
There are several (free) machine learning courses available from Udacity including Intro to Machine Learning which was part of the Self-Driving Car series that Elecia took.
The future basics episodes were grouped into:
Flow of program control (pre-RTOS)
Design patterns
RTOS information
Anita Pagin gave us an insider’s view of being a recruiter.
Anita recently started at Carbon3D and is recruiting for software and hardware.
Anita also does career coaching on the side. Given the advice she gave us for free, imagine what she could tell you if you paid her.
Finally, Elecia’s favorite list of resume keywords.
Chris Svec (@christophersvec) returns to chat about recruiting for embedded jobs and to help us answer listener questions. Also, he’s looking for engineers to join him at iRobot.
Want to get into embedded and don’t know how? We did a show about that: 211: 4 Weeks, 3 Days. Also, there is an EdX class that is popular and a Coursera course that may be useful.
You can meet up with Chris at Hackaday Supercon in Pasadena, CA on Nov 2-4.
Fulgurites are cooled lightning.
James Grenning (@jwgrenning) returns to discuss TDD, Agile, and web courses.
James was on Embedded.fm episode 30: Eventually Lighting Strikes.
James' new company is Wingman Software.
His excellent book is TDD for Embedded C.
James suggested Training From the Back of the Room! as resource to people looking to put together a class. He uses and recommends CyberDojo as a coding instruction tool.
Before Agile was Agile-for-business, it was Extreme Programming. James recommends Extreme Programming Explained.
James will be the keynote speaker at AgileDC in October.
Professor Angela Sodemann of @ASU spoke with us about new ways of teaching, robotics, and haptic displays.
Angela’s robotics courses can be found at RoboGrok.com, including the parts kit. Note that they focus on creating usable robotics as well as teaching theory so there is math, code, and hardware.
Noah Leon made a film: Love Notes to Newton. It features the people who love and the people who built the Apple Newton. We spoke with him about the Newton and about filmmaking.
Noah runs Moosefuel Media. He wanted to mention Frank Orlando of OrlandoMedia, the art designer for the film and promotional material. Profits from Love Notes to Newton go to Be The Match, a registry of bone marrow donors.
You can sign up for the Newton mailing list at NewtonTalk.net. The book about the Newton development is Defying Gravity: The Making of Newton by Markos Kounalakis. The documentary about Compaq is Silicon Cowboys (Netflix).
Helen Leigh (@helenleigh) is an author, education writer and maker. She spoke with us about making learning fun (and subversive).
Her latest book is The Crafty Kid's Guide to DIY Electronics, out in November 2018.
The instrument gloves were the mi.mu (full version) and the mini.mu DIY kit (coming soon to Pimoroni and Adafruit). The mini.mu uses the BBC Micro:bit.
Helen worked on earlier books including Mission Explore from the Geography Collective. These are out of print but still obtainable (and may be in your local library).
She recommends the book The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine. For meeting people in education and technology, Helen is looking forward to the next EMF Camp. As far as tech and education conferences, the BETT trade show is interesting.
We mentioned “Phoenix” a few times, that is Phoenix Perry who was on episode 204: Abuse Electricity.
Christopher (@stoneymonster) and Elecia (@logicalelegance) talks about vacations for learning and hobbies then answered listener questions.
Chris’ toys include the Prusa I3 Mk3 and the UAD Arrow.
Elecia likes Camille Fournier’s book, The Manager’s Path. She also got to plug her own book, Making Embedded Systems: Design Patterns for Great Software.
Pacific spiny lumpsucker (Eumicrotremus orbis) at the Seymour Science Center
Brandon Wilson (@brandonlwilson) shared his stories about hacking TI calculators (and other things).
TICalc.org has the latest on getting started yourself including Z80 assemblers, or start on Brandon’s website: brandonw.net
Bradon will be speaking at Hardwear.io, a security conference for the hardware and security community. The conference consists of training (11th - 12th Sept 2018) and conference (13th - 14th Sept 2018). It is in The Hague, Netherlands. His talk is The Race to Secure Texas Instruments Graphing Calculators. He will also be hosting a village called Dumping the ROM of the Most Secure Sega Genesis Game Ever Created.
Topics:
00:00:00 Introduction 00:00:33 Brandon Wilson 00:01:39 Lightning Round 00:02:37 Calculators! 00:03:58 Programmable calculators, using TI BASIC 00:05:00 Ti-85, programmable via assembly language 00:06:35 App store for my calculator? 00:07:34 How does TI prevent cheating? 00:09:41 Testguard for teachers 00:12:53 Some are WiFi capable 00:13:41 How Brandon learned to hack the TI 00:15:12 Processors used in the TI calcs 00:16:39 What tools are available for reverse engineering? 00:17:42 Breaking the keys 00:18:49 Flash unlock protection 00:20:14 TI hacker community 00:21:32 TI used 512-bit RSA keys 00:22:32 Key broken after 2 months of brute force 00:22:58 TI threatened the first key breaker 00:23:31 Built a distributed community to attack keys 00:24:38 TI was not happy 00:25:03 DMCA takedown notice 00:27:28 EFF offered to help 00:29:30 The ethics of circumventing TIs protection 00:33:23 Calculators as a platform for learning HW/FW 00:35:11 Hackers' responsibility toward the hacked 00:39:05 Hacks Brandon is uncomfortable with 00:42:55 Bug bounties, are they effective? 00:44:02 Brandon's other projects 00:44:26 TI calculator processors used all over 00:44:50 Sega Genesis 00:47:54 Code execution via the Sega Genesis CD 00:53:35 Calculators changed my life (back up) 00:54:21 Other projects, USB 00:55:31 Abuse the USB protocol 00:58:24 Modifying USB flash drive FW 01:03:21 Reverse engineering tools 01:06:13 Hardwear.io conference, Brandon's hacking village 01:09:22 Brandon's Final Thought 01:10:19 Outro 01:11:20 Final Quote
We spoke with Axel Poschmannof DarkMatter LLC(@GuardedbyGenius) about embedded security.
For a great in-depth introduction, Axel suggested Christof Paar’s Introduction to Cryptography class, available on YouTube. We also talked about ENISA’s Hardware Threat Landscape and Good Practices Guide.
Axel will be speaking at Hardwear.io, a security conference for the hardware and security community. The conference consists of training (11th - 12th Sept 2018) and conference (13th - 14th Sept 2018). It is in The Hague, Netherlands.
Elecia has some discount coupons for the Particle.io Spectra conference.
Derek Fronek spoke with us about FIRST robotics. His TechHOUNDS (@TechHOUNDS868) team is based in Carmel, Indiana. They won the state competition and placed 5th in the high school FRC championship.
Derek mentioned the roboRIO controller board, TalonSRX speed controller, and the Spark motor controller. Many of these offer deep discounts to FIRST robotics participants.
Check out FirstInspires.org to find a team near you. The game comes out in January but many teams start forming in September.
Derek’s personal website includes his other projects and a way to contact him.
Sparkfun has an autonomous vehicle competition, this is their 10th year.
Elecia wrote a related blog post for Derek, a few notes about media training.
Chris (@stoneymonster) and Elecia (@logicalelegance) celebrate the 256th episode with a confusing lack of cupcakes.
IAmTheCalvary.org has an excellent Hippocratic Oath for Connected Medical Devices
Make Magazine has some tips to tighten security on DIY IoT Projects.
Rockstar Language Specification (and FizzBuzz example)
The C++ episode discussed was #247 with Jason Turner.
Topics and Times:
00:00 Zero 00:27 Intro and cupcakes 03:09 Patreon and Slack 04:24 Transcripts, chapter markers? 07:48 Listener question: ST HAL, Cube, SPL, Bare Metal? 14:22 Hippocratic Oath for Connected Medical Devices 19:32 Make magazine article on DIY IoT Security 22:36 NYC Embedded and Engineering Meetup? 23:42 C++: Expressiveness, optimization vs. good code 30:21 C++: Spec size vs. C#/Java 32:22 A question of parentheses leads to mild violence and ranting 35:43 Rockstar: The Language! 43:59 Wherein we "discuss" Rust for some reason, again. 46:45 Elecia's Projects in Python and JSON 50:18 Elecia's available for gigs! 50:50 Elecia's ML overview blog post 51:38 The end of Embedded 52:42 Wrap up 54:04 Winnie the Pooh continues...
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.
Ariel fell in love with NASA while watching the When We Left Earth miniseries.
Gabriel Jacobo (@gabrieljacobo) spoke with us about embedded graphics, contributing to the Linux SDL, using MQTT, and working far from his employers.
Gabriel’s blogand resumeare available on his site mdqinc.com. His github repo is under gabomdq.
SDL is Simple DirectMedia Layer (wiki). It is not so simple.
For MQTT-based home automation, he uses the Raspberry Pi Home Assistantbuild and many Node MCUs(ESP8266s running Lua, Micropython, or Arduino Framework).
Micah Elizabeth Scott (@scanlime) came to talk about Fadecandy, a really neat way to control smart LEDs (NeoPixel, AdaFruit's term for the WS2812). The conversation ranged from beautiful LED control algorithms and open source embedded projects to triangle tessellations, art, and identity.
AdaFruit has a great intro to Fadecandy.
Fadecandy is open source hardware and software, see the repository.
Micah's blog is a combo of art and technology.
Burning Man's Ardent Mobile Cloud (also a lovely still pic).
Elecia also mentioned Deep Darc's hack of the GE Color Effects lights.
Jen Costillo (@rebelbotjen) joins Elecia White to discuss the secret parts of C, keywords that only embedded software engineers seem to know about.
Jen and Elecia talk about interviewing and why these keywords make good questions for finding folks who use the language to its full potential. On the show they mention a list of embedded interview questions with answers. (Note: Elecia's book has many excellent interview questions and what interviewers look for when they ask them.)
Producer Christopher White sends along a more concise introduction to the often unused register keyword.
NOTE: This is a repeat episode from before we'd settled on our name. Note that Jen is the co-host of the Unnamed Reverse Engineering Podcast.
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.
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.
Katie Malone (@multiarmbandit) works in data science, has podcast about machine learning, and has a Phd in Physics. We mostly talked about machine learning, ways to kill people, mathematics, and impostor syndrome.
Katie is the host of the Linear Digressionspodcast (@LinDigressions). She recommended the Linear Digressions interview with Matt Mightas something Embedded listeners might enjoy. Katie and Ben also recently did a show about git.
Katie taught Udacity’s Intro to Machine Learningcourse (free!). She also recommends the Andrew Ng Machine Learning Coursera course.
Neural nets can be fooled in hilarious ways: Muffins vs dogs, Labradoodles vs chicken, and more. Intentional, adversarial attacks are also possible.
Impostor syndromeis totally a thing. We’ve talked about it before. You might recognize the discussion methodology from Embedded #24: I’m a Total Fraud.
Katie works at Civis Analyticsand they are hiring.
This week, we spoke with Addie (@atdiy) and Whisker (@whixr), the Toymakers (@Tymkrs).
Their latest CypherCon badges included a complete phone system. For more information, check out the user documentation at hackthebadge.com or the related Reddit post.
There is a video of Joe Grand’s 2018 CypherCon talk if you’d like to watch him talk about his juvenile delinquency.
In our last episode with Addie and Whisker (#205), we talked about the CypherCon 2017 badges and their Tindie store.
The "Drew" mentioned is Drew Fustini (@pdp7). Though only Whisker supports accosting him to talk about OSH Park board colors.
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 tutorialsfrom 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.)
Claire Rowland (@clurr) joined to discuss creating good user experiences for the Internet of Things. Claire is the lead author of Designing Connected Products: UX for the Consumer Internet of Things.
You can find more about her on clairerowland.com, from her talks (including Interusability: UX for Connected Products), her book's website, and her guest appearance on the IoT Podcast (episode 21). Her new report about user experience and the IoT will be on Iotuk.org.uk in June of 2018.
Elecia was also on the IoT Podcast: episode 158.
It was @SwiftOnSecurity who posted the tweet about experts and their typical response.
Chris (@stoneymonster) and Elecia (@logicalelegance) answer listener emails.
We did a show with Dennis Jackson about transitioning from software to embedded: 211: 4 Weeks, 3 Days
Chibios RTOS: MyNewt or Zephyr may be more worth your time.
Software tool: Beyond Compare for excellent differencing, including folder level
Other people answer STEAM vs STEM (in about the same way we did).
C++ standards for safety: NASA, ESA, JSF-AV rules, and Jason Turner’s C++ best practices.
Elecia played with Javascript to make a watchface for her Fitbit Versa
Chris got a Blackaddr Guitar Teensy Shield which uses the Teensy Audio Library to do amazing guitar effects via code.
Elecia’s Twitter bot is @pajamaswithfeet (Tracery code on cheapbotsdonequick.com)
Jason Turner (@lefticus) of the CPPCast (@cppcast) spoke with us about modern C++ in embedded systems.
Jason’s articles can be found on EmptyCrate.com. You can also contact him there and find out more about his training sessions. Jason’s video channel is on C++ Weekly and includes an ARM emulator written in C++, running on Compiler Explorer.
Jason recommended looking at Odin Holmes’ twitter (@odinthenerd) as well as Odin’s talks from CPPCon (such as his 2017 talk about agent based class design). Odin runs an embedded C++ conference in Germany called Embo++. Also look into Jens Weller’s Meeting C++conference.
During the show, Elecia was looking at cppreference.com. She would also like to apologize to Bjarne Stroustrup.
Alvaro Prieto (@alvaroprieto) spoke with us about laser turrets, tearing down quadcopters, flux capacitors, the moon, and culture at work.
Alvaro's github repositories including Proto-X quadcopter information, Silta bus monitoring, and Skype video message exporter for OSX.
One of the inspirations for taking apart the Proto-X was watching Micah talk about her Coastermelt project. We talked to her about it on episode 101: Taking Apart the Toaster.
One of his reasons for going to Planet Labs was knowing Shaun Meehan, check out his Amp Hour interview.
Daemon by Daniel Suarez
Video of Supercon talk on laser shooting robots
Podcast Award nominations open in early 2016
Getting a picture of the moon in stereo requires some planning especially in 1949 when Alvaro's great-grandfather took these. On the slide are two images of the moon that combine to create a nicely stereo image.We spoke with Dr. Bennie Lewis (@_benjoe02) about machine learning and robotics. Bennie is a Senior Research Scientist at Lockheed Martin, content creator, and Twitch streamer (benjoe02)
NVIDIA Jetson platformand Cuda for deep learning
SAMS C++ in One Hour a Dayby Siddhartha Rao
Stephen Kraig (@Macro_Ninjaneer) and Parker Dillmann (@LnghrnEngineer), of Macrofab (@MacroFab) joined us to chat about getting hardware and software to work together.
Stephen and Parker are also hosts of the Macrofab podcast.
We compared out-the-ordinary podcast guests. For MacroFab episode 112 it was their conversation with a patent lawyer. For Embedded episode 150 it was our conversation with a tax accountant.
Schematics for the Apollo Guidance Computer (and their Kicad replica on github).
Kristina Durivage (@gelicia) described her path getting into making and hardware hacking as a complement to her day job working in front-end software.
Kristina’s portfolio.gelicia.com includes write-ups on her projects (TweetSkirt, Kitchen Playset Game) as well as links to her talks. Or you can skip to her github.com/gelicia repository.
Kristina has a chapter in the 10 LED Projects for Geeks book coming out from NoStarch Press.
Thank you to Patreon Embedded supporters for Kristina’s mic!
Elecia and Kristina both recommend the classic Robert Aspirin Myth Adventure books!
We spoke with Michael Barr (@embeddedbarr) about the Barr Group embedded systems survey.
You can download the 2018 survey at the Barr Group survey page. The Barr Group Embedded C Coding Standardis also free to download (with registration). You can buy a paper copy on Amazon.
Programming Embedded Systems in C and C++ 1st Editionby Michael Barr, also available for free in HTML on the Barr Group site. The second edition is Programming Embedded Systems: With C and GNU Development Tools, 2nd Editionby Michael Barr and Anthony Massa.
The second book was Embedded Systems Dictionaryby Jack Ganssle and Michael Barr
Elecia’s book is Making Embedded Systems: Design Patterns for Great Software.
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 Catand a Cartoon Guide to the Internet of Things). You can find more of her writing and videos on BuzzFeedand 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:
Andrei Chichak and Alvaro Prieto (@alvaroprieto) join us to talk about bits and how to manipulate them.
Alvaro is host of the Unnamed Reverse Engineeringpodcast. His other Embedded appearances are 130, 200, and 215.
Andrei (“Andrei from the Great White North”) works at CBF Systems. His other Embedded appearances are 99, 114, 139, and 200.
Andrei wrote about bit manipulation as part of Embedded Wednesdayson Embedded.fm: Logic in C, part II. Andrei recommends using ISO646.hto reduce confusion around bit manipulation. Also, his suggested calculator is the SwissMicros DM16L
Elecia wrote an introduction to binary and hex.
For more information about programming and binary, see How to Count by Steven Frank
For advanced bit twiddling, check out:
Jasmine Brackett (@asiwatch) spoke with us about @Tindie’s electronics marketplace, this year’s Hackaday Prize, and tips for wearable electronics.
If you want to buy on Tindie, check out their homepage tindie.com. If you want to sell, that is straightforward too: tindie.com/about/sell.
There is an Embedded contest for the Tindie Blinky LED badge, a nifty little learn to solder kit. Contest ends April 20, 2018 (midnight UTC). You are to send a number to us using the contact link. Closest one wins. One number per person.
You can also get these badges at the Dublin Hackaday Unconference (April 7, 2018, Dublin, Ireland) and at meetups where Jasmine is a presenter.
Thank you to Ben Hencke for some good questions. He talked about his Tindie store with us on 220: Cascading Waterfall of Lights.
Jasmine mentioned the RC2014, homebrew z80 computer kit.
Both Tindie and Hackaday are owned by Supplyframe.
Finally, we talked to Emile Petrone when Tindie was a fairly new thing on 72: This is My NASA Phone.
What do you do after space debris, hacking dinosaurs, and judging robots? If you are Dr. Lucy Rogers (@DrLucyRogers), you build an organization devoted to promoting the Making industry: Guild of Makers (@GuildOfMakers)
Lucy’s personal site is lucyrogers.com. She wrote the book It’s ONLY Rocket Science: An Introduction in Plain English.
Guild of Maker’s Twitter hack chats are weekly on Tuesdays at 8pm UTC. They use the tag #MakersHour.
Lucy programs in Node-RED, a visual language.
Dan Saks answers many questions about C++ in embedded systems: where it works, where it doesn't, and a path to getting started.
Dan Saks is the founder and president of Saks & Associates. He was a columnist for The C/C++ Users Journal, Embedded Systems Design and several other publications. He also served as secretary of the ANSI and ISO C++ standards committee in its early years.
We touched on some of his articles:
Andrei suggested Sams Teach Yourself C++ in One Hour a Day, Seventh Edition by Siddhartha Rao as a good primer for experienced C programmers reluctantly learning C++.
NOTE: The contest already ended.
Chris and Elecia answered some listener questions about dynamic memory and shared code. Then Elecia gave a presentation about ShotSpotter, the gunshot location system she worked on.
Elecia enjoyed The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America's Enemies by Jason Fagone.
Ben is the editor of HackSpace, a new magazine about making (and hacking). It's produced by Raspberry Pi, but it's technologically agnostic. The first issue is free online.
The ShotSpotter presentation was originally given with Sarah Newman at the 2008 Grace Hopper Celebration of women in computing.
Jan Jongboom (@janjongboom) of Mbed (@ArmMbed) joined us to talk about compilers, online hardware simulators, and inference on embedded devices.
Find out more about Mbed on mbed.com. The board simulator is at labs.mbed.com(Mbed OS Simulator). The code for the simulator is on Jan’s Github. Mbed Labs also has the uTensor inference framework for using TensorFlow models on devices.
You can see some of Jan’s talks and his blog on janjongboom.com.
Jan will be running a workshop at SxSW called Changing the World with Open, Long-Range IoT on March 10 in Austin, TX. Additionally, he will be hosting an IoT Deep Dive Workshop on LoRA on March 14 (also in Austin, TX).
For background on LoRA, check out the recent Amp Hour episode with Richard Ginus.
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:
We spoke to author Robin Sloan (@robinsloan) about his books and near-future science fiction.
Robin wrote Mr. Penumbra’s 24 Hour Bookstore and Sourdough.
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:
Dustin Franklin of NVIDIA (@NVIDIAEmbedded) spoke with us about the Jetson TX2, a board designed to bring AI into embedded systems.
Dusty wrote Two Days to a Demo, both the original supervised learning version and the newer reinforcement learning version. In general, check out Dusty’s github repo to see what’s new. Also, The Redtail project is an autonomous navigation system for drones and land vehicles based on the TX2.
The NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference is in San Jose, CA, March 26-29, 2018. Your coupon for 25% off: NVCYATO
The Jetson TX1/TX2 ChallengeRocket contest ends February 18th.
You can find Dusty on on the NVIDIA forums.
Chris and Elecia chatted about listener emails, and other stuff and things.
Elecia wrote a book called Making Embedded Systems, if you want to see the chapter about interrupts and timers, hit the contact link on embedded.fm.
We also recommend our blog, Chris Svec wrote about the MSP430 from a microprocessor point of view (ESE101) and Andrei Chichak wrote about an ST processor with a more pragmatic and C focused view (Embedded Wednesdays).
You can support the podcast through Patreon.
Kalman filter explanation video with Pokemon
Ben Krasnow's Applied Science YouTube channel
Usbourne's books for teaching kids electronics and programming (the free '80s ones are near the bottom)
Formally verified microkernel: seL4 Microkernel
The first Pokemon games used every programming trick there is for optimization
STM bought Atollic and released TrueStudio Pro for free for STM parts
We spoke with Jackson Keating (@jacksonakeating) about Bluetooth Low Energy, going over GATTs layouts and the general BLE usage.
While Jackson prefers the Bluetooth spec as the best reading explanation, Elecia liked the Adafruit BLE introduction. She wrote about some of her initial experiences with different chips and Chris Svec wrote about BLE roles. We all agreed that the examples and tutorials from your chip vendor is a good place to get experience.
A random UUID generator is uuidgen on Mac or online on uuidgenerator.net.
Elecia mentioned 108: Nebarious, an Embedded episode where we talked about how BLE lacks security.
Jackson suggested looking at the Core Bluetooth API for IOS development as well as the Nordic and LightBlue apps for debugging.
Tim O’Reilly (@timoreilly) talks about economics, books, and the future. Check out Tim’s new book, WTF: What’s the Future and Why It’s Up to Us. And yes, this is Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly books.
Elecia’s Making Embedded Systems has a great-eared nightjar, but she’s finally adjusted to a modern dinosaur on her cover.
Sunshine Jones (@Sunshine_Jones) spoke with us about synthesizers, electronics, and philosophy.
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.
Nick Kartsioukas (@ExplodingLemur) spoke with us about information security, melting down spectres, lemurs, and sensible resolutions.
Nick recommends Aumasson’s Serious Cryptography (also available from NoStarch) as a good orientation. (Offline, he also recommended Shneier’s Secrets and Lies.)
When thinking about security, you need to develop your threat model (EFF) and not panic (Mickens). As a user of the internet, there are some getting started guides (Motherboard, EFF, Smart Girl’s Guide to Privacy) along with Nick’s advice of using an antivirus program (comparison), an Adblocker (uBlock), a password manager, and 2-factor authentication. Data backups are also very useful (3-2-1 rule: 3 copies, 2 separate media, 1 offsite). For a professional infosec perspective, the CIS 20 are best practice guidelines for computer security.
For Spectre and Meltdown, the best high-level explanation is in Twitter from @gsuberland though XKCD does its usual good job as well. For more detail, about speculative execution bugs, check out this github readme.
For the history of the Stuxnet, check out Zetter’s Countdown to Zero Day and the Security Now podcast episode 291.
Ham radio Field Days for 2018 are June 23-24
Last but not least: Depression lies so get help and if you want to know how to help someone else, look at MakeItOk.org
The Amp Hour and Embedded join up to send a holiday letter to listeners.
Chris G is ever improving Contextual Electronics. Chris W has a new band: 12AX7. Elecia still has a book: Making Embedded Systems.
Amp Hour episodes mentioned in this one:
Embedded episodes mentioned:
We talked about teaching which led to:
Books we are reading!
Elecia got a JTrace Pro Cortex-M for herself for Christmas. Chris W got a Moog Werkstatt and an assortment of Teenage Engineering small synths. Chris G mostly got sweaters because Chicago is very cold.
BMW now sends YouTube ads via snail mail
Anthony Navarro (@avnavarro42) of Udacity (@udacity) spoke with us about learning.
We talked about the Dreyfus model of skill acquisition (an education-oriented technical readiness level) and a little about on trunk skills vs. leaf skills.
Elecia took Udacity’s term 1 of Self-Driving Car Nanodegree and is planning to take the free AI for Robotics course next. Anthony is enjoying soldering lessons via Boldport (hear #171: Perfectly Good Being Square and Green).
Anthony noted there is a free Embedded course on Udacity.
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.
Please note that our Patreon model has shifted to monthly instead of per-episode.
Maria Gorlatova spoke with us about how the combination of devices and cloud computing will change the world as we know it.
Maria’s bio, blog, and LinkedIn page.
Other topics:
Note: we really should have talked about Amazon and FreeRTOS. I heard another podcastmight have mentioned it. We’ll try to get more info soon.
Windell Oskay (@Oskay) of Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories (@EMSL) told us about co-authoring a book: The Annotated Build-It-Yourself Science Laboratory.
Some great EMSL links:
The book Chris brought up was Thinking Physics.
Windell is also on Google Plus.
Contest to get Windell's signed book has already ended!
Andrei Chichak joins Elecia and Christopher to do a deep dive into the world of interrupts.
Andrei writes on our blog: Embedded Wednesdays. He has written specifically about interrupts in multiple ways: general introduction, buttons and debouncing, peripheral data transfer via DMA, and so on). The knock-knock joke comes from Chris Svec’s Embedded.fm blog post on interrupts.
Christopher (@stoneymonster) and Elecia (@logicalelegance) chat about listener questions and things they’ve been up to.
A listener turned Chris on to Ray Wilson and his Music From Outer Space website on DIY analog synths and book Make: Analog Synthesizers. After collecting parts for a total DIY, he found and built a neat kit: Kastle Synth (as heard on the show) and has connected it to his Roland SE-02 Analog Synthesizer (on Amazon). BTW, his ham radio WSPR kit is the Ultimate 3 in case you are behind on hobbies. You can hear more about it in 197: Smell the Transistor.
Elecia has been working through Udacity’s Self-Driving Engineer nanodegree. She completed term 1 with its computer vision and machine learning and is on to term 2 with sensor fusion, localization, and control. She blissfully is unaware of the cost because she got to be an industry expert for the Intro to Self-Driving Cars course.
Listener Simon asked about non-fiction books. Elecia gets many of hers by looking at what is on discount at BookBub’s science section which lead to two books she highly recommends Spirals in Time (snail facts) and Tristan Gooley’s How to Read Water (beach explainer).
Chris has been reading Scott Wolley’s The Network: The Battle for the Airwaves and the Birth of the Communications Age and How Music Works by David Byrne.
Some show-related recommendations include Gretchen Bakke’s The Grid (hear Gretchen on episode 213: Electricity Doesn’t Behave Like an Apple) and Jimmy Soni’s Mind at Play (hear Jimmy on episode 221: Hiding in Plain Sight). She’s reading Tim O’Reilly’s WTF book about the future in anticipation of an upcoming episode. That's a good reminder: we, of course, also recommend Making Embedded Systems.
Zach asked about Michael Barr’s Embedded Software Training in a Box. Apologies if we weren’t specific enough, it would likely make a better blog post.
Also: $1 Microcontrollers!
Jonathan Beri (@beriberikix) spoke with us about his double life: Particle.io product manager by day, maker by night (and weekends).
Jonathan wrote a chapter about piDuino5 Mobile Robot Platform in JavaScript Robotics.
Product manager resources from product.careers and Ken Norton's Newsletter. For an alternate take, there is a good cartoon about effective product management from Henrik Kniberg.
For getting into open source, see the guide from Github. Also, there is a newi-sh consortium, the TODO group, with guides and resources about running open source projects.
There is also the often useful Google's developer documentation style guide.
NerdRage’s video on the chemistry of etching
The Essential Guide to Electronics in Shenzhen by Bunnie Huang
Speaking of Robot Operating System (we did, briefly), IEEE Spectrum had a nice history of ROS.
Author Jimmy Soni (@jimmyasoni) spoke with us about his biography of Claude Shannon, founder of information theory and digital circuit theory.
A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age by Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman. For an introduction to the book, read their post 10,000 Hours With Claude Shannon: How A Genius Thinks, Works, and Lives.
Rome's Last Citizen: The Life and Legacy of Cato, Mortal Enemy of Caesar by Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman
The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation by Jon Gertner
Mark Levinson’s Particle Fever is a documentary film about the Large Hadron Collider. He is also directing a film about Claude Shannon
Scientific Aspects of Juggling by Claude Shannon
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).
More about the 4-bit Radio Shack computer (and an Arduino-based emulator for it!)
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).
More about the 4-bit Radio Shack computer (and an Arduino-based emulator for it!)
Talia's nightlight
Josh Bleecher Snyder (@offbymany) joined us to talk about PayPal's Beacon, being acquired, the Go programming language, BTLE, computer vision, and working at a large company after founding small ones.
Bluetooth Low Energy: A Developer's Handbook by Robin Heydon
Learning OpenCV: Computer Vision by Gary Bradski and Adrian Kaehler
Gatt is a Go package for building Bluetooth Low Energy peripherals (video description by Josh from GopherCon 2014)
Machine learning's Theano
Eigen Library for matrix math
Kelly Shortridge (@swagitda_) spoke with us about the intersection of security and behavioral economics. Kelly’s writing and talks are linked from her personal site swagitda.com. Kelly is currently a Product Manager at SecurityScorecard.
Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
What Works by Iris Bohnet
Risky Business, a podcast about security
Teen Vogue’s How to Keep Your Internet Browser History Private
Surveillance Self-Defense from EFF, including security for journalists as mentioned in the show
Twitter suggestion @SwiftOnSecurity, @thegrugq, and @sawgitda_.
Dirk Akeman of SEGGER (@SEGGERMicro) joined us to talk about debugger specifics.
We recently did two other shows on debugging: a general intro with Alvaro Prieto and one with a focus on the development-system’s debugger software interface with Pierre-Marie de Rodat.
Herd immunity and find a flu shot
And, yes, we did bleep Dirk's answer for favorite processor because he later reconsidered the idea that he only had one favorite.
Bob Skala of Interactive Instruments spoke with us about very large servo motors, wind tunnels, and staying current in tech.
Hydraulic Press YouTube channel (and our favorite video)
The Wright Brothers by David McCullough
Other good tech podcasts included The Amp Hour and HamRadio 360 WorkBench
Chris talked about getting into WSPR in 197: Smell the Transistor but we first talked about it in 76: Entropy is For Wimps. The new WSPR mode he mentioned is called FT8 (google it).
And a note from Bob:
Below is a link to a type of servo system that tries to simplify the interface to be more like a stepper. It integrates the driver and motor into a single package so you can treat it like a stepper with digital step and direction or serial commands. You get the smoothness, speed, accuracy and low power (when idle) of a servo but the servo motor, driver, and cabling are integrated into one magic box. You add a DC supply and simple control signals and you are all set. They came out with this to replace stepper motors. I haven’t used one yet but I hope to at some point.
https://www.teknic.com/products/clearpath-brushless-dc-servo-motors/
Carmen Parisi (@FakeEEQuips) joined us to talk about electronics and podcasts.
Carmen works on switching regulators. If you want to know more, he sent along some very basic application notes: How to Apply DC-DC Step Down Regulators (Analog Devices) and Switching Regulator Fundamentals (TI). The digital communication method with these switchers is the I2C-like PMBus. If all those make sense, dive a little deeper with chapter 9 of the online and free Linear Circuit Design Handbook. Carmen says the whole book is excellent for analog information. Also, the free chapter of the Art of Electronics is on power. If all that still makes sense, you may be Carmen if you can also write an app note like this one: Multiphase Buck Design From Start to Finish (Part 1).
Carmen is a host on The Engineering Commons (@TEC_Podcast). Some episodes you might enjoy are 93: Capacitors with James Lewis of KEMET (aka BaldEngineer) and 77: Remote Host Toast with Elecia White.
Some suggested books from Carmen:
Elecia mentioned How to Diagnose and Fix Everything Electronic by Michael Jay Geier and promised a PID image from her book Making Embedded Systems.
Alvaro Prieto (@alvaroprieto) joined us to talk about the basics of debugging, from software to hardware.
Some of the programmer devices we talked about: SEGGER JLink and Black Magic Probe.
Chris mentioned a visual frontend for gdb called "Vulcan" but which is actually called Voltron. (He's got graphics on the brain).
How did we forget to mention the six stages of debugging?
Alvaro Prieto and Jen Costillo's new podcast on reverse engineering! And on Twitter as @unnamed_show.
Alvaro's Cheese Cave: making cheese and cheese-lapse photography of Brie aging.
Kristen Dorsey explained MEMS sensors: how do they work, how they are made, and what new ones we expect to see in the future.
Kristen’s website is kristendorsey.com. She is a professor of engineering at Smith College and runs the MicroSmithie.
MEMS stands for microelectromechanical systems (Wiki). Used in some sensors, Galistan is a room-temp liquid with interesting properties (Wiki).
A few interesting MEMS applications:
One of Kristen's stretchy strain sensor, not MEMS (so you can see it)
Gretchen Bakke spoke with us about the future of power generation and transmission. Her book is The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future.
Gretchen is a professor of anthropology at McGill University.
Grechen’s first book is Anthropology of the Arts: A Reader
Kwabena Agyeman joined us to talk about making OpenMV (@OpenMVCam), an easy-to-use camera and control module with built-in machine vision functions, all interfaced via MicroPython.
To learn more about computer vision, Kwabena suggested looking at PyImageSearch or reading the April tags code as it is a good introduction to image manipulation and matrix operations.
Some other interesting links:
Dennis Jackson spoke with us about making the career shift from software to embedded.
Dennis buys James Grenning’s Test Driven Development in Embedded C for his new hires and often recommends Elecia’s Making Embedded Systems. His tip that everyone should know was “Learn make!” and he has a reference for that: Why Use Make.
He suggested Joel Spolsky’s reading lists from Joel On Software, even the ones that don’t obviously apply.
Additional suggested-reading articles:
In his previous appearance on Embedded (#25: Don’t Be Clever), we talked about code complexity and measuring cyclomatic complexity. At that time he wanted a tool to monitor the code’s status. He has since found one: pmccabe.
Dennis currently works at Element Science.
Alan Yates (@vk2zay) told us about his entries to the 2017 Flashing Light Prize. Alan's entries involved making a light bulb and dripping charge.
Alan works at Valve. He told us about making virtual reality hardware in Embedded episode 162: I Am a Boomerang Enthusiast.
Hackaday SuperCon is Nov 11-12, 2017 in Pasadena.
Pierre-Marie de Rodat (@pmderodat) joined us to talk about how debugger software works (and what compilers tell the debugger).
Pierre-Marie works for AdaCore on GNATcoverage (among other things). His github repo is pmderodat.
Note that the AdaCore sponsored Make with Ada competition is running right now but you still have time to enter! Last year’s winner, Stephane Carrez with EtherScope, made an Ethernet monitor for an STM32 board (github).
GDB supports Python scripting!?!!!
DWARF is the most standard debugging data format. Before that it was stabs. To see this information in a Linux or Mac system, use objdump. (It is really interesting!)
Foundation by Isaac Asimov
Elecia gave a talk about machine learning and robotics at the Hackaday July Meetup at SupplyFrame DesignLab (video!) and LA CrashSpace. She gives it again in the podcast while Chris narrates the demos.
Embedded show #187: Self Driving Arm is the interview with Professor Patrick Pilarski about machine learning and robotics applied to prosthetic limbs.
I have also written more about my machine learning + robot arm on this blog. My code is in github (TyPEpyt).
My machine learning board is Nvidia’s Jetson TX2. The Two Days to a Demo is a good starting point. However, if you are new to machine learning, a better and more thorough introduction is the Andrew Ng’s Machine Learning course on Coursera. To try out machine learning, look at Weka Data Mining Software in Java for getting to know your data and OpenIA Gym for understanding reinforcement learning algorithms
I use the MeArm for my robot arm. For July 2017, the MeArm kit is on sale at the Hackaday store with the 30% off coupon given at the meetup (or in Embedded #207).
Inverse kinematics is a common robotics problem, it took both Wiki and this blog post to give me some understanding.
I wasn't sure about the Law of Cosines before starting to play with this so I made a drawing to imprint it into my brain.
Robot Operating System (ROS) is the publisher-subscriber architecture and simulation system. (I wrote about ROS on this blog.) To learn about ROS, I read O’Reilly’s Programming Robots with ROS and spent a fair about of time looking at the robots on the ROS wiki page.
I am using OpenCV in Python to track the laser. Their official tutorials are an excellent starting point. I recommend Adafruit’s PCA9685 I2C PWM/Servo controller for interfacing the Jetson (or RPi) to the MeArm.
Finally, my talk notes and the Hackaday Poster!
Natalie Silvanovich (@natashenka) discussed reverse engineering hardware, working on security software, and the fantastic world of Tamagotchis.
Original CCC 2012 talk: Many Tamagotchis Were Harmed in the Making of this Presentation
CCC 2013 talk: Even More Tamagotchis Were Harmed in the Making of this Presentation
Natalie's upcoming BlackHat talk: Attacking ECMAScript Engines with Redefinition
Flash exploit article for Project Zero: One Perfect Bug: Exploiting Type Confusion in Flash
Tamagotchis are still available as are the works of Shel Silverstein (Snowball is in Falling Up).
Natalie's Tamagotchi boardChris Svec (@christophersvec) has an idea about adding empathy to software development. It is a good idea.
His blog is Said Svec. He works for iRobot and they are hiring. (Chris' email is given toward the end of the show but if you hit the contact link here, we'll pass along info to him.)
Embedded has an episode devoted to impostor syndrome.
O'Reilly's Head First book series is pretty awesome.
Elecia is still talking about Thinking, Fast and Slow as a great way to understand brains. Chris Svec also recommends Make It Stick.
The Richard Hamming quote came from his address to the Naval Postgraduate School. The whole lecture is available on YouTube.
Professor Ayanna Howard of Georgia Tech joins us to talk about robotics including how androids interact with humans. Some of her favorite robot include the Darwin, the Nao, and, for home-hacking, the Darwin Mini.
Ayanna has a profile on EngineerGirl.org, a site that lets young women ask questions of women in the engineering profession.
Elecia has been working on a typing robot named Ty, documented on the Embedded.fm blog. It uses a MeArm, on sale in July 2017 at Hackaday.com, with coupon noted in show. (don't use PayPal to check out or you can't apply the coupon).
Other robots for trying out robots: Lego Mindstorms (lots of books, project ideas, and incredible online tutorials!), Cozmobot, Dash and Dot. Some robotics competition leagues include Vex, Botball, and FIRST.
This week, we mix things up a bit. This joint show with the Don't Panic Geocast. This episode explores what happens when electrical engineering meets geoscience in cold places. We’re joined by guest Dr. Sridhar Anandakrishnan of Penn State to talk about geopebbles, ice, climate, and more!
Fun Paper Friday: The Boring Company
This week we talked to Addie (@atdiy) and Whisker (@whixr), the Toymakers (@Tymkrs). They make electronics kits, videos, and conference badges.
Toymakers site (tymkrs.com) has a link to their IRC channel, videos, and Tindie store(including those amazing heart simulators, the easy to make Amplify Me, and Protosynth Midi).
Their reddit community is r/Tymkrs. It has a lot more information about the CypherCon 2017 badges. More about CypherCon at cyphercon.com.
Some of their ZombieTech podcast is available on YouTube (along with First Spin and Patch Bay, see the playlists to find grouped series). Note that Rabbithole is the name of their hackspace as well as the video series documenting project creation. Episode 200 has the violin we discussed.
We seem to have talked about a lot of other people on the show, especially shared friends and past Embedded.fm guests (some of whom were on ZombieTech).
Some fiction for you:
Phoenix Perry (@phoenixperry) spoke with us about physical games. Phoenix is CTO of DoItKits (@DoItKits) and
More about Phoenix:
Physical games are sometimes called Alt Ctrl such as at the Alt Ctrl Game Jam.
Phoenix co-founded Code Liberation with Nina Freeman (http://ninasays.so/) and Jane Friedhoff (http://janefriedhoff.com/). “Code Liberation catalyzes the creation of digital games and creative technologies by women, nonbinary, femme, and girl-identifying people to diversify STEAM fields.” There is an 8-part workshop in London in Summer 2017 (more info).
Some other interesting people:
How to Get What You Want wearables site
I know you only read the show notes because you wanted this link: Velastat LessEMF has the supplies for ghost hunting!
Charlie Ladd (@csladd) joined us to give an overview of good hardware practices.
The oil quality sensor is from VSI Oil.
Recent fiction included Ready Player One, John Scalzi, and Matthew Mather.
To stay current, Charlie reviews the trade magazines: EEWeb.com, EDN, ECN, and EETimes.
A junior engineer's tale of woe.
Professor Alex Dean spoke with us about his ARM embedded systems books and @NCState courses.
Alex’s page in North Carolina State University’s department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
His book is Embedded Systems Fundamentals with Arm Cortex M Based Microcontrollers: A Practical Approach (ecopy available from the ARM Media site). It uses the FRDM-KL25Z as the example board throughout the text.
Alex also co-authored Embedded Systems, An Introduction Using the Renesas RX62N
His favorite RTOS is Keil RTX.
We also mentioned about Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body by Neil Shubin and Flush by Carl Hiaasen
Shaun Meehan (@logiclow) joined us to talk about robot arms and stealth rocket companies. Shaun’s rocket startup is hiring; information about the job openings are below.
Shaun’s robot arm is an ABB IRB-2000 (video of Fred). Elecia was reading How to Choose the Right Industrial Robot when Shaun emailed. He convinced her that the MeArm Pocket Size Robotic Arm is the likely best choice for her machine learning typer project (which needs a better name).
All this led to a discussion of inverse kinematics, robot operating system (ROS), and OpenAI. SparkFun has a nice guide to selecting the right motor if the DC, servo, stepper section went by a bit fast. Elecia mentioned the TI Piccolo line as good motor controllers, assuming you aren't building an FPGA controller from scratch on your own.
Repair cafes are a thing.
Shaun was on The Amp Hour 220: Doctiloquent Dove Deployer where he talked a lot more about his robot pets. For more about Fred, the robot arm, check out LogicLow.com. Also, see Shaun's github repo, Fun with Flip-Dots (on hackaday.io), his intended page for big servos (Not Your Hobby Servo, also hackaday,io) His personal site detailing new projects, motors, and fire-breathing dodo birds is ShaunAndKelly.com.
Shaun recently enjoyed The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary.
Stealth Space Rocket Company Hiring Information
We are a small, highly entrepreneurial team of rocket engineers with deep technical expertise who love to build things and relish the idea of a grand challenge.
Building on over a decade of technology development in rocket propulsion, structures, and avionics funded by NASA and DARPA, we are applying a fast-paced, hardware-focused, agile approach to space launch.
Are you an engineer, hacker, maker, or physicist who has always dreamed of building rockets? Come help us build the hardware and launch the services that will open the frontier of space to the next generation of entrepreneurs.
The company is in the San Francisco Bay Area, California. If you want to apply, email Shaun: space at logiclow dot com.
Episode 200! Let’s have a party (and a survey)! Former guests joined us in a panel-style celebration of working in embedded systems: Alvaro Prieto, Andrei Chichak, Elizabeth Brenner, Chris Svec, and Chris Gammell.
Alvaro Prieto (@alvaroprieto) was a guest on 130: Criminal Training Camp.
Andrei Chichak writes Embedded Wednesdays and was on 99: You Can Say a Boat, 114: Wild While Loops and 139: Easy to Add Blood Splatter.
Elizabeth Brenner (@eabrenner) was a guest on 17: Facebook Status: Maybe Not Dead and 54: Oh, The Hugh Manatee,
Chris Svec (@christophersvec) writes Embedded Software Engineering 101 was on 78: Happy Cows and 139: Easy to Add Blood Splatter.
Chris Gammell (@Chris_Gammell) was a guest on 35: All These Different Reasons Why You Might Want to Do Something as well as a co-host on the holiday Embedded/Amp Hour crossover episode 181: Work on It for Ten Years.
Fiction mentioned:
Episodes cited as favorites:
Tools discussed:
Notes: T-shirt sales are probably already over unless you hurry. March micro madness and Digilent Digital Discovery contests also end very soon.
Chris and Elecia answer listener questions about contracting (and consulting).
Reminders: T-shirts! Hat contest! Digilent contest announced in #197! It all ends around May 18th so get your entries in now!
The original discussion was on episode 4: Are We Not Lawyers?
Elecia's salary to rate conversion can be found as a Google spreadsheet.
Walter Stockwell spoke with us about the legalization of drones, UAVs, UASs, and UFOs.
Walter works at DJI which makes the Phantom. They have some jobs open.
Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson
Intel/Pepsi drone show at SuperBowl halftime
The amateur model aircraft organization discussed was the Academy of Model Aeronautics(AMA).
ASSURE UAS Ground Collision Severity Evaluation Final Report (also: press release)
Elecia mentioned the Madgwick Filter.
Embedded.fm t-shirts are available for a limited time! There are two distributors: one US based, one Europe based. Choose whichever is closest to you.
Elecia’s TV appearance on The Jennylyn Show is on YouTube.
Digilent Digital Discovery contest ends May 19.
Chris and Elecia talk with each other about science fiction, advertising, ham radios, debugging tools, and programming languages.
You can buy Embedded.fm t-shirts until May 18, 2017. You can always buy Elecia’s book: Making Embedded Systems. And don’t forget we have a Patreon if you’d like to support the show directly.
Some science fiction we mentioned: Seveneves by Neal Stephenson, Nightfall and Last Question by Isaac Asimov, and the All This Time video from Jonathan Coulton.
Digilent sent us goodies to review: one Analog Discovery 2 and two Digital Discovery units. So we did, though we didn't cover the high speed adapters and other nifty goodies. Check out Alvaro Prieto’s Troubleshooting tools HDDG talk for some additional information on the devices. For the giveaways, rules are in the show, hit the contact link to enter. Contest ends May 19th.
Chris has been doing low-power ham radio contacts (WSPR) using an Ultimate 3S kit from QRP Labs. We talked about WSPR some with Ron Sparks in episode 76: Entropy Is For Wimps
Make with Ada competition is back! It start May 15, 2017. We talked the 2016 competition with Fabien Chouteau in episode 158: Programming Is Too Difficult For Humans.
Elecia is still fighting with Ubuntu before she can build her robot typist with her NVidia Jetson TX2 board.
Philip Freidin sent in Stanford CS department’s reply to the lightning round question of “what language should you learn in the first college course?” Even better, he sent a link to a google spreadsheet showing how many schools answer the question.
Elecia was on the Jennylyn Show. (I’ll update with a link to the specific episode on YouTube when it is available.)
March Madness ended with PyBoard as the champion, more info on getting your winner’s hat soon.
Aditi Hilbert (@HilbertAditi) spoke with us about MyNewt, an Apache-licensed RTOS and bootloader.
MyNewt’s Apache page is mynewt.apache.org and the github repository is github.com/apache/incubator-mynewt-core. In the README.md, check out the section marked browsing which points to the file system, ble stack, and assorted other source code goodies you may want to read. The secure bootloader code is also in there but as it is also a cross-RTOS effort (with Linux’s Zephyr), you can find the MCUBoot repository at github.com/runtimeco/mcuboot
Aditi works for Runtime.io (@runtime_io), a primary contributor to MyNewt. They work with companies who want to use MyNewt on their products.
We talked about OIC (openconnectivity.org) and using UDP endpoints over BLE. Constrained http is actually called constrained application protocol: CoAP (coap.technology). We also mentioned MQTT, an older standard attempting to solve some of the same problems.
The Apache license is one of the most permissive of open source licenses: choosealicense.com/licenses
Assorted other links discussed in the show:
We discussed CubeSats with their co-inventor, Professor Jordi Puig-Suari, Professor of Aerospace Engineering at CalPoly SLO and co-founder of Tyvak Nano-Satellite Systems.
The 2017 CubeSat conference is in San Luis Obispo, CA on April 26-28. More details at CubeSat.org.
Information about CubeSats at CalPoly SLO can be found at PolySat.org.
Tyvak is hiring for a number of different positions: tyvak.com/careers.
For more satellite goodness, we spoke with Patrick Yeon of Planet about their CubeSat-based platform and deployment mechanism in Embedded episode 153: Space Nerf Gun.
Thank you to Embedded Patreon supporters for Jordi’s microphone!
Shulie Tornel (@helixpea) joined us to talk about the 2017 Hackaday Prize (@hackaday and @hackadayio).
Hackaday World Create Day is April 22nd, let them know if you want do a meetup so they can add you to the calendar.
Elecia gave away all of her potential ideas, trying to figure out which one would work best for entry. It was probably Maxwell except for its lack of novelty (Embedded shows #17 and #54and there is a SparkFun Tutorial).
Are you entering? The first phase (until May) is community driven (popularity contest). Post your entry here or tweet to us (@embeddedfm) and we'll like it. Also, it was Shantam Raj's Self-sustained Ultralow-power Node that we discussed in the show.
Embedded blog contributor Chris Svec was on the CodeNewbie podcast talking about robots and chip design. The following week Saron invited Elecia to record an episode about getting into hardware and embedded software.
Owen Anderson (@OwenResistor) joined us to talk about how compilers are written. We discussed LLVM, intermediate representation, clang, and GPUs.
As mentioned at the end of the show, Owen’s current employer is hiring. If you are interested and would like to get the brownie points that come with being a friend of a friend, contact us and we’ll connect you to Owen and he’ll submit your resume.
Recent books Owen mentioned: Manager Path, Feminist Fight Club, The Laundry Files seriesby Charles Stross.
Teardown of what goes into rasterization
What Every C Programmer Should Know About Undefined Behavior
Terry Dunlap, CEO of Tactical Network Solutions (@tacnetsol), spoke with us about security in the Internet of Things.
The good:
The bad and the ugly:
Chris (@stoneymonster) and Elecia (@logicalelegance) answer listener emails.
Get your entries in for March Micro Madness, the matches start very soon.
The short story Elecia finds most memorable is All Summer in a Day by Ray Bradbury.
We mentioned Procopio who teaches microcontrollers at the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education ITESM (site, wiki)
Hector sent up the IEEE Code of Ethics, a good high-level set of rules.
Matt Godbolt (@mattgodbolt) spoke with us about settling arguments with Compiler Explorer.
Compiler Explorer comes different flavors:
You can see the beta version by putting a beta on the end: https://gcc.godbolt.org/beta/
This a fully open source project. You can read the code and/or run your own version:
Matt works at DRW working on low latency software. Note that DRW is hiring for software engineers. You can read about the evolution of Compiler Explorer on their blog.
Matt’s personal blog is xania.org. You might like parts about 6502 Timings. He also has several conference talks on YouTube including x86 Internals for Fun & Profit and Emulating a 6502 in Javascript. Matt was previously at Argonaut Games.
Jason Turner of C++ Weekly and his C++17 Commodore 64
Could a Neuroscientist Understand a Microprocessor? paper (with a nod to Don’t Panic GeoCast’s Fun Paper Friday)
Kari Love (@ikyotochan) spoke with us about creating soft robotics. You can see her edible soft robots talk from 33c3. Kari works at Super-Releaser. Her personal site (and blog) is Kari Makes.
Kari mentioned that the Super-Release intern Aidan had some picks for soft robotics on Instructables.
Super-Releaser created the Glaucus soft robot and Adafruit has an in-depth tutorial for how to make it.
Some videos of soft actuators and soft robots:
Soft Exoskeletons
Rat heart cell robot from Popular Mechanics
First Autonomous Entirely Soft Robot (Harvard Octobot)
VoxCad Tutorial for simulating soft robotics
Also, if you haven’t seen Big Hero 6, you should. Consider it computer science homework. If you just want to see Baymax, here is a short video.
Octopus: The Ocean's Intelligent Invertebrate (Elecia’s latest octopus related reading, the previous one was called Kraken)
Scott Hanselman (@shanselman) of the Hanselminutes Podcast talks about technology podcasting and philosophy.
You can find Scott's blog on Hanselman.com/blog and his other podcasts on Hanselman.com/podcasts.
We talked about Hansleminutes' WebVR episode with Ada Rose Edwards and Alcohol and Tech with Victor Yocco. We also mentioned Scott's blog post from 2014 about what technologies he would learn if he had to start over.
Crossing machine intelligence, robotics, and medicine, Patrick Pilarski (@patrickpilarski) is working on smart prosthetic limbs.
Build your own learning robot references: Weka Data Mining Software in Java for getting to know your data, OpenIA Gym for understanding reinforcement learning algorithms, Robotis Servos for the robot (AX is the lower priced line), and five lines of code:
pred = numpy.dot(xt,w) delta = r + gamma*numpy.dot(xtp1,w) - pred e = gamma*lamda*e + xt w = w + alpha*delta*e xt = xtp1Patrick even made us a file (with comments and everything!).
Once done, you can enter the Cybathlon. (Or check out a look at Cybathlon 2016 coverage.)
Machine Man by Max Barry
Snow Country by Bokushi Suzuki
Aimee Mullins and her many amazing legs (TED Talk)
Patrick is a professor at University of Alberta, though a lot more than that: he is the Canada Research Chair in Machine Intelligence for Rehabilitation at the University of Alberta, and Assistant Professor in the Division of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, and a principal investigator with both the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii) and the Reinforcement Learning and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (RLAI). See his TED talk: Intelligent Artificial Limbs.
Indrek Rebane (@RebaneIndrek) spoke with us about the Garage48 Hardware and Arts hackathon, hardware incubators in Estonia, linguistics, hydrology, and startup investments.
Garage48 Hardware & Arts hackathon is February 17-19, 2017 at the Institute of Physics, University of Tartu (Tartu, Estonia). The event is organized by Garage48, University of Tartu and the Estonian Academy of Arts.
Indrek is CTO of Build It Hardware Accelerator and electronics engineer for Hedgehog Engineering.
Recommended book: The Mom Test: How to talk to customers & learn if your business is a good idea when everyone is lying to you
Other resources Indrek mentioned after recording:
While we planned to ask Andrei Chichak to podcast when he was in town for the Embedded.fm party, we spent too much time goofing off. So we are replaying Andrei's first appearance on the show where he spoke with us about MISRA-C and ethics. (Note that this is the same Andrei who writes the STM32 Embedded Wednesday posts for the Embedded.fm blog.)
Linker post: It's dangerous to go alone! Take MISRA-C
Andrei's has personal website (we failed to talk about his kite aerial photography, it is really neat though) and his company is CBF Systems.
Plum Hall C Compiler Validation
JPL Coding Standards for C (and the mentioned video discussing Mars Code)
ISO 26262 Automobile software standard
Cortex-R for high reliability systems (ARM's description)
National Society of Professional Engineers code of ethics and Canadian Engineering Guidelines on the Code of Ethics
Offline, Andrei recommended two books and another podcast about MISRA:
Debby Meredith (@DebbyMe) stops by to tell us what it is like being a venture partner and interim VP of engineering. Debby is a venture partner at Icon Ventures. Her website is DebbyMeredith.com. She was on a new podcast: Women Who Code Radio.
Computer History Museum's new exhibit is Make Software: Change the World. It opens on January 28, 2017.
After recording, Debby mentioned a book she likes: Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist.
Ben Krasnow (@BenKrasnow) spoke with us about prototyping, Patreon, and staying current. And a whole bunch of stuff.
January 28th Hats and Hacks Party RSVP
Ben’s YouTube channel is Applied Science. His recent videos have been shot with the high speed Chronos camera (whose creator David Kronstein was on The Amp Hour #325).
Ben has a Patreon page which funds randomness. (Embedded also has a Patreon page, for randomness and mics.)
Ben was previously on the show: 119: Do Your Neighbors Have Any Idea?
For BLE prototyping, Ben mentioned the OSH Chip by Philip Freidin (146: The Loyal Opposition) and using Processing for Android to make quick-n-dirty test applications.
We mentioned the Wazer desktop waterjet.
Chris brought up this video describing impedance with a mechanical model.
One of Ben’s favorite videos that he did was the first one with an electron microscope, way back in 2011: DIY Scanning Electron Microscope - Overview.
Ben gets a lot of his news from Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/
Ben’s Twitter criteria was that they didn’t post updates often too often for his one-a-day check and that they focus on tech:
And some of his favorite YouTube channels (Ben said it was very difficult to distill as there are many great choices):
We also mentioned architect Frank Howarth of the urbanTrash channel.
Philip Koopman (@BetterEmbSW) spoke with us about making better embedded software. His Better Embedded Systems Software blog has lots of great information including links to his growing video library. Two posts noted in the show:
His company, Edge Case Research, performs design and code reviews and teaches how to do them. You can find out more about his course and background on his Carnegie Mellon University staff page. That also leads to the pretty amazing Vintage Aero paper airplanes.
Phil’s book is Better Embedded Software, available via koopman.us and (more expensively) Amazon.
Videos of robots being stressed
Chris (@stoneymonster) and Elecia (@logicalelegance) talk with each other about about a party, listener emails, and assorted questions.
RSVP for the Embedded.fm party!
The Embedded Blog is at embedded.fm/blog. Chris Svec wrote a post about picking a processor platform.
Don’t Panic Geocast episode with Elecia
Elecia’a book: Making Embedded Systems
Compiler explorer is GodBolt.org
Imposter Syndrome: episode #24 is all about. And you might find #78 with Chris Svecrelevant. Also: Adam Savage talking about overcoming self-doubt.
The RSS feed for all of our shows (not only the most recent 100) is http://makingembeddedsystems.libsyn.com/rss
We have a Patreon fund that buys mics for guests (plus the occasional goodie for us and our blogging team).
RTL-SDR: Software defined radio
Chris Gammell (@Chris_Gammell) of The Amp Hour and Contextual Electronics joined Elecia and Chris for a holiday special Ampbedded (EmbHour?) episode.
Embedded will be having a Hats and Hacks party in Aptos, CA. You can come! RSVP on Eventbrite.
Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation
Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise
Embedded blog (with Andrei Chichak and Chris Svec) including a post on podcasts we listen to
Hemmingway App, useful for making writing clearer and simpler
Tweezer sets make excellent gifts
The Way Things Work Now is an update on a classic book
Flybrix is a LEGO drone platform for learning control systems and flight robotics. The founder was on Embedded #157.
makexyz: 3D printing in your neighborhood
Video of Tesla seeing two cars ahead, having an accident
The LDC1000 has never been attached to a Bluetooth sensor
Free calculus book online: Single Variable Calculus: Early Transcendentals. There are other online textbooks approved by the American Institute of Mathematics.
Raptitude’s Maybe You Don’t Have a Problem
Isaac Asimov is a great inspiration: Medium Post by Charles Chu
Have you ever wondered how your programming tool works? Piotr Esden-Tempski and Gareth McMullin have built the Black Magic Probe and joined the show to explain how it works.
Kickstarter for Black Magic and 1Bitsy ends December 29th. If you missed it (or need a Black Magic v2 instead of waiting for v2.1) go to the 1BitSquared Store. For more in-depth information about Black Magic, look at Gareth's github repo. For more information about the 1Bitsey dev board, look at 1bitsy.org.
Contest! Tweet to @1bitsquared.
The YouTube channel about electronic teardowns was Mike's Electric Stuff: youtube.com/user/mikeselectricstuff.
If you want to say other hellos to Piotr, try his personal account: @esden. Or you can contact Gareth via Black Magic's Gitter channel.
Embedded.fm Hats-n-Hacks party will be 2-5pm on Saturday, January 28, 2017 in Aptos, CA. More details soon, including how to RSVP.
Miro Samek (@mirosamek) of Quantum Leaps spoke with us about making better state machines through actor objects and hierarchical state machines.
Miro wrote a book: Practical UML Statecharts in C/C++: Event-Driven Programming for Embedded Systems. He has an excellent YouTube channel explaining embedded concepts. We discussed his video that describes how a stack overflow works and the related in-depth post on EmbeddedGurus.com.
Elecia enjoyed his object oriented programming in C PDF for both the OO and the UML refresher.
Miro mentioned the Software Engineering Radio podcast. We mentioned our favorite podcasts blog post. Also, we talk about Jean Labrosse's recent episode of Embedded.fm.
We spoke with Chris Maury (@CMaury) about using speech recognition to interact with devices.
Note: Please turn off your Echo and Dots as we invoke Alexa a lot.
Chris is the founder of Conversant Labs. They created TinCan.ai which can help you wireframe or prototype a conversational user interface. They can also help you build Alexa Skills, though if you are so inclined, you might try it for yourself: Alexa Skills Kit.
Chris will be speaking at the O'Reilly Design Conference in San Francisco, CA in March 2017, giving a tutorial on building voice based user interfaces. You can read more from Chris on his Medium posts medium.com/@CMaury.
Some of the embedded devices Elecia mentioned:
We haven't gotten embedded.fm (or any podcast) to work with Alexa but we aren't sure why. Have you?
After a few announcements, we replayed the episode where James Grenning told us about Test Driven Development.
Note: the contest mentioned in the show is over. However, the SparkFun TinkerKit contest ends December 9th so you still have time to win something!
Other announcements include:
Chris and Elecia answer listener emails on-air.
Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction by Philip E. Tetlock and Dan Gardner
The Wild Robot by Peter Brown
Toni Klopfenstein (@ToniCorinne) joined us to talk about what it is like working at SparkFun(@SparkFun) and why open source hardware is important.
Open Source Hardware Association (OSHWA.org) has a certification program for open source hardware projects and products.
Some of the SparkFun products and posts we talked about:
Open Source Hardware Summit was in Portland, OR in October.
Hackaday Superconference was in Pasadena, CA in November. Their site has the 2015 videos available. (There was an Embedded.fm show about it too!)
Jean Labrosse of Micrium (@Micrium) spoke with us about writing a real time operating system (uC/OS), building a business, and caring about code quality.
Take a look at the uC/OS operating systems (available for free to makers) and Jean's excellent and free RTOS books (it was the Kinetis one that talks about the medical process). Also, check out the uCProbe which integrates with your debugger to replace some logic analyzer and oscilloscope features.
Jean's blog about detecting stack overflows: part 1 and part 2.
We spoke to Evan Shapiro, CTO and cofounder of Knit Health (@KnitHealth), about baby monitors, IoT security, neural nets, and professional poker.
The Knit Health Kickstarter ends November 17, 2016.
Evan recommended Google Tensor Flow and Python's Theano for an introduction to machine learning. (If those sound familiar it is because Kat Scott mentioned them as well.) Evan also suggested that if you'd like to know more about the history of neural nets, check out this post by Audrey Korenkov.
If you'd like a gentle introduction, check out a Narwhal's Guide to Bayes' Rule.
Evan mentioned some videos he did about poker, they are on Card Runners (NOTE: it is a paid site with free tastes).
Final quote was from Neil Gaiman's excellent Graveyard Book.
George Stocker (@gortok) spoke with us about software, Jewelbots (@Jewelbots) and learning embedded systems to ship the product.
Elecia's book is Making Embedded Systems. George also recommended Getting Started with BLE and Programming Pearls.
The processor we talked about was the Nordic nRF51, a BLE system on a chip.
James Cameron of One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) tells us about Forth, science fiction, and laptops.
We have some tickets for ARM's mbed Connect conference is Oct 24, 2016 in Santa Clara. Will you be in the area? Want to go? Contact us if you want one of our free tickets! (There are still some tickets remaining.)
One Laptop Per Child is one.laptop.org.
Some getting started information on Forth: Mitch Bradley's Forth and Open Firmware Lessons
James has been writing about putting C Forth on a Teensy (more on the Teensy from the creator's site). He also has a post on using Forth to snoop the Milo Champions Band's BLE.
James is Quozl on most sites that require a unique ID (such as Github: https://github.com/quozl). This is from a book called Quozl by Alan Dean Foster. The other older-sci-fi reference was to the Pern books by Anne McCaffery, specifically to the White Dragon.
Saar Drimer of Boldport (@boldport) spoke with us about the crossover of art to electronics and building a business around it.
Monthly, the Boldport Club ships aesthetically-pleasing electronics kits. We discussed past projects include The Lady and Touchy on the show. The seahorse board is on the blog.
Micah Scott (@scanlime) has entrancing videos of putting together the first club project (Pease) and second one (Superhero).
Saar uses PCBMode to create his circuits. He also wrote the tool. It is open source.
Cratejoy is used for the sales and shipping logistics.
Elecia tries to get Chris to do her homework in preparation for her "Embedded Software: The Tricky Parts" presentation at IEEE-Computer Society meeting in San Jose, CA on Oct 11, 2016. If you register, you can attend, in person or online! And for free!
We have some tickets for ARM's mbed Connect conference is Oct 24, 2016 in Santa Clara. Will you be in the area? Want to go? Contact us if you want one of our free tickets! (There are still some tickets remaining.) Also: their unit test framework is GreenTea (not whatever Elecia said).
After a few new announcements, we replayed the episode where Jack Ganssle shared his wisdom on being a good embedded software engineer (hint: it takes discipline).
The new announcements include:
Jack's website is filled with great essays and new videos. He's also written the Art of Designing Embedded Systems and The Embedded Systems Dictionary (with Michael Barr).
We covered a lot of ground, here are some of the highlights:
John Leeman (@geo_leeman) spoke with us about geophysics and associated technology.
John is one of the hosts of the Don't Panic GeoCast (@dontpanicgeo, iTunes). Some episodes you may like:
John is teaching a course at Penn State called Techniques of Geoscientific Experimentation. The information and textbook is online! It uses the SparkFun Inventor's Kit.
John has a website with a blog. He has some Cheerson CX-10 tiny drone posts (my favorite, also Alvaro's repo and my posts). John also has a consulting company: Leeman GeoPhysical.
Python! Lots of Python was discussed.
Contest! Contest ends October 1st and now there are more books! In addition to the ones Bob Apthorpe is sponsoring, John's consulting company will sponsor: Earthquake Storms: An Unauthorized Biography of the San Andreas Fault by John Dvorak and The Soul of A New Machine by Tracy Kidder.
Briana Morey from MC10 (@mc10inc) spoke with us about stretchable electronics, Tesla coils and lasers. She works at MC10, creators of the L'Oreal My UV Patch as well as the BioStampRC.
MC10 is hiring! They are in Lexington, MA, US. The embedded software position is filled already but the EE position is still open.
Briana mentioned an excellent science fiction book she'd read recently: Too Like Lightning by Ada Palmer.
Chris and Elecia chat about Bayes Rule, aliens, bit-banging, VGA, and unit testing.
Elecia is working on A Narwhal's Guide to Bayes' Rule.
ACM has a code of software engineering ethics
Toads have trackers (NPR story)
An introduction to bit-banging SPI (Arduino, WS2812)
We talked to James Grenning extensively about testing on 30: Eventually Lightning Strikes (and about his excellent book Test Driven Development for Embedded C). We spoke with James again on 109: Resurrection of Extreme Programming. We also talked about unit testing with Mark Vandervoord on 103: Tentacles of the Kraken.
A neat TED Talk involving octo-copters, still four short of dodecahedracopter.
Neat Z80 based very minimal computer kit
Bob Apthorpe (@arclight) spoke with us about software, nuclear engineering, and improv.
Bob is giving away three books! Send in your guess by October 1, 2016. One entry per person. (More info below.)
Hackaday SuperCon is Nov 5-6, in Pasadena, CA.
Bob's long languishing blog is overscope.cynistar.net.
Peep (The Network Aualizer): Monitoring Your Network with Sound
Safety-I and Safety-II: The Past and Future of Safety Management
Now! The books you may win!
Atomic Accidents by James Mahaffrey, someone who knows the technology and history and does a fantastic job explaining complex failures in an engaging way without resorting to fear-mongering and hyperbole. (Guess Elecia's number for this one.)
Safeware by Nancy Leveson, may be 20 years old, it's still full of amazing insights for delivering safe, reliable systems and ways of looking at the organizational contexts in which these systems are built and used. Even if you aren't developing safety-critical systems, it's a fantastic resource and really thought-provoking. (Guess Christopher's number for this one.)
Every Anxious Wave by Mo Daviau is a novel about rock & roll, time travel, love, loss, and finding things you didn't know you were looking for. Full disclosure: The author is Bob's ex-wife. (Guess Bob's number for this one.)
Shimona Carvalho (@shimonkey) joins us to talk about user interface design in embedded systems. Then we talk about internationalization and localization. Then photography.
Shimona's website is shimonacarvalho.com and her Flicker account is shimonkey.
For an introduction to user interface design, Shimona recommended The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman.
Internationalization and localization were delved in far deeper in episode 26: The Tofu Problem. Some of the material from that will be on the embedded.fm/blog this week.
We mentioned an auxiliary, secret RSS feed that goes all the way back to episode one. (Some notes haven't been filled in yet).
We're also on Youtube now.
Christopher White resurrects an Apple ][+ with his brother Matthew White. This is a show about the software Christopher and Matthew wrote when they were kids and the hardware they wrote it on.
Matthew's favorite fictional robot (we should have asked): Venus Probe from Six Million Dollar Man. We did ask about his favorite fictional computer and there is a video for that too.
Eric Schlaepfer's Monster 6502
Kerbal Space Program for the Apple ][
Elecia got to $42 in Lemonade Stand by the end of the show
Matthew's Nebula Wars and Eye of Eternal Death BASIC games circa 1985 and 1981 respectively.
If you feel like it, you can try out an Apple ][ in your web browser, with tons of disks available at the Internet Archive or in a Javascript Emulator.
Elecia's book is Making Embedded Systems.
Elecia went to Hackaday's SuperCon, got to announce the Hackaday Prize 2015 winners, then talked to the organizers about their conference.
The guests this week were (in order of appearance):
Adam promised us a list of contributors to the goodie bag. Here it is!
Nadya Peek (@nadyapeek) joined us to talk about making machines that build things.
Nadya's website is infosyncratic.nl, which includes her blog. Nadya's dissertation defense on Making Machines that Make: Object-Oriented Hardware Meets Object-Oriented Software was standing room only.
MIT Center For Bits and Atoms, which studies "how to turn data into things, and things into data."
Machines that Make: MTM.cba.mit.edu
Valve's Alan Yates (@vk2zay) spoke with us about the science and technology of virtual reality.
Elecia looked at the iFixIt Teardown of the HTC Vive system as she was unwilling to take apart Christopher's system.
Alan shared some of his other favorite reverse engineering efforts: Doc OK’s Lighthouse videos, documentation on github by nairol, and a blog by Trammell Hudson.
Alan's sensor circuit diagrams were on twitter: SparkleTree sensor circuit (think simplified) and the closer-to-production Lighthouse sensor.
Make Magazine talked about Valve's R&D Lab. This is important in case you want to work at Valve (they are currently hiring for EE but if that doesn't describe you and you want to work there, apply anyway).
Alan also has a website (vk2zay.net) though it doesn't see much updating right now.
Kat Scott (@kscottz) gave us an introduction to computer vision. She co-authored the O'Reilly Python book Practical Computer Vision with SimpleCV: The Simple Way to Make Technology See. The book's website is SimpleCV.org. Kat also suggested looking at the samples in the OpenCV Github repo.
To integrate computer vision into a robot or manufacturing system, Kat mentioned ROS (Robot Operating System, ROS.org).
Buzzfeed had an article about SnapChat Filters.
Kat works at Planet. And they are still hiring.
Daniel Hienzsch (@rheingoldheavy) and Majenta Strongheart (majentastronghe_art) gave us suggestions on setting up a home shop and information on setting up a maker space.
Daniel is the resident engineer at SupplyFrame's Pasadena Design Lab. He still the owns and runs RheingoldHeavy.com, a company devoted to educational boards, as we talked about on episode 115: Datasheeps.
Majenta's web page is MajentaStrongheart.com. We talked more about School of the Art Institute of Chicago with Sarah Petkus in 142: New and Improved Appendages.
Chris and Elecia talk to each other about compiler optimizations, bit banging I2C, listener emails, and small-town parades.
Games to learn/play with assembly languages include The Human Resource Machine by Tomorrow Corporation and TIS-100 by Zachtronics.
We've been enjoying the Embedded Thoughts blog. And Chris is reading Practical Electronics for Inventors and liking it.
We talked a little about Interview.io's adventure in voice changing.
Shirts are gone for awhile. New logo stickers are available at StickerMule if you'd like to support and share the show.
Fabien Chouteau (@DesChips) of AdaCore (@AdaCoreCompany) spoke with us about theMake with Ada Programming Competition.
Giveaway boards are GONE.
The Ada programming language (wiki) is interesting in that it was designed for safety critical embedded systems (actually designed, requirements doc and everything!). The Ada Information Clearinghouse has a nice list of tutorials and books as does the very helpful Make with Ada Getting Started page. Elecia's favorite was Inspirel's Ada on Cortex.
Some neat projects in Ada that we mentioned on the show:
The platforms supported in the contest are on the Getting Started page but you can expand that by looking at the SVD files in the AdaCore drivers on github. (Also, SVD files are neat.) One of the platforms already supported is the Crazyflie nanodrone.
Robb Walters of Flybrix (@flybrix) spoke with us about LEGO-based drones. We graciously let him leave with all his hardware. This time.
For a limited time, you can get an Embedded.fm tshirt: teespring.com/embedded-fm. Order by the end of June or miss out. (More info about the shirts.)
You can order your Flybrix kit and or read their controller code on github (or their controller app code).
Robb mentioned a C++ book he liked, it was Effective Modern C++: 42 Specific Ways to Improve Your Use of C++11 and C++14 by Scott Meyers.
He also noted LEGO bricks resale sites: Brickowl and Bricklink. LEGO Digital Designer looks like a fun way to design builds.
Cascade PID controllers are on Wikipedia (though I found this tutorial a little easier).
The congratulations offered at the top of the show were to Meshpoint.me for winning the Best Humanitarian Tech of the Year at the Europas Conference.
Jeri Ellsworth (@jeriellsworth) spoke with us about the latest developments at CastAR, hiring engineers, and her favorite engine.
Embedded.fm T-Shirts are available until the end of June on Teespring (more info).
CastAR is making an augmented reality system. They are in Palo Alto, CA, USA and they arehiring. They work with Playground.
Jeri was last on Embedded.fm episode 23: Go For Everything I Want.
Jonathan Bradshaw spoke with us about working with hardware engineers, schematic reviews, and FPGAs.
At the end of the podcast, Jonathan made a pitch for folks to submit proposals for the IEEE Southern Power Electronics Conference in Auckland in December.
The FPGA boards Elecia mentioned were the XLR8 board and the Papillio platform (more on the latter in show #66).
By the way, The Amp Hour is our “enemy podcast” but we actually like their show quite a lot. It is a joke. But do feel free to tweet their shameless advertising tweet with the link replaced with one to our show.
Jeff Keyzer (@MightyOhm) joined us to talk about consumer manufacturing, how to solder, and having a full time job and a kit company.
Jeff's blog is on MightyOhm.com. The Geiger Counter kit is available atMightyOhm.com/geiger. The really, really useful Soldering Is Easy comic book isMightyOhm.com/soldercomic.
At Valve, Jeff worked on the Steam Controller (hardware specs at bottom of the Valve page or for sale on Amazon). There is also a neat video showing the manufacturing automation in action.
We mentioned Glowforge, Dan Shapiro was on episode 125 (and if you are going to buy one, please consider using our referral link!)
Elecia and Chris have a Hakko FX-888 soldering iron. Jeff suggests Kester 186 flux which you can get in smaller-than-giant containers on eBay. No, not the pen on Amazon. Or maybe the MG Chemicals 835 (which is in little bottles on Amazon). Flux seems like a very personal thing.
Patrick Yeon of Planet Labs spoke with us about making satellites.
We discussed a method of using orientation to control drag to control speed. While Patrick wasn't sure what he could say about GPS receivers on satellites, another site describes them as part of the flock.
Sign up to get access to the huge Open California data set.
Planet has many applications and their blog shows off some interesting finds, such as identifying illegal gold mines encroaching on rainforests, quantifying ports with computer vision, counting trees and classifying agriculture crops, fire mapping, and cloud detection.
They are still hiring, apply using the email embeddedfm at planet.com will earn us (err, not you) more free tshirts.
Chris and Elecia chat about hobbies and respond to listener feedback and questions.
Chris was on an episode of Let's Drone Out, you can listen to it here or search in your favorite podcast platform. It is recorded and broadcast live every Thursday at 8 P.M. (UTC+1) onPowering On.
Chris' new quadcopter is a Vortex 285. It runs Clean Flight, an open source flight controller software package.
While we had various opinions about RTOSs, we were both interested in the one Alvaro suggested to us: Zephyr Project.
As for other embedded podcasts, of course you know about The Amp Hour. And we had Saron of CodeNewbie podcast on, that show is mostly software and people. How aboutMacrofab Engineering? Or O'Reilly's HW podcast?
Paul Sidenblad spoke to us about his engineering career, starting off with GE's work on theGambit spy satellite.
Elecia read Eye in the Sky: The Story of the CORONA Spy Satellites a few years ago and remembers liking it, though this was the first time the information was useful.
Torie Charvez spoke with us about what it takes to start and run your own business in the US. We talked about starting your own consulting company, selling your latest gadget, and all of the bookkeeping, tax issues, and details involved.
Torie's company is Tax Goddess. The write-off publication she mentioned is on the IRS site isChapter 8 of Publication 535.
Elecia mentioned her Snow White's Guide to Your First Stock Options.
Craig Smith (@OpenGarages) spoke with us about hacking the software in cars.
His book is the Car Hackers Handbook. There is a 40% off coupon toward the end of the show.
OpenGarages is Craig's site to improve and encourage hacking. Some tools he recommends for getting started are USB2CAN and CANTact.
An older (shorter) version of the handbook is on OpenGarages.
I Am The Cavalry (iamthecavalry.org) is an excellent site for learning more about security.CERT.org is also good.
Theia Labs is Craig's company.
Saron Yitbarek (@saronyitbarek) spoke with us about Code Newbie, a site that help people learn to program and about the Code Newbie podcast.
We mentioned Paul Ford's Code Newbie episode discussing his Bloomberg issue code.
Saron also has a personal blog which has her post I am not a tinkerer.
Saron spoke on Punching Your Feelings in the Face at ELA Conf 2015.
Micah Elizabeth Scott (@scanlime) joined us to talk about her new art and engineering projects.
Micah's site is misc.name/ and her YouTube channel is micahjd. She launched a Patreon page.
Wiggleport has its own site (wiggleport.org) and github (github.com/wiggleport). Check out the art in the repo! The Bela project on kickstarter has some overlap.
Micah will be keynoting the 2016 Open Source Hardware Summit in Portland in early October.
Her Eclipse project (video) was at the NEAT exhibition at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, CA.
Micah has been on Embedded.fm before: 101: Taking Apart the Toaster (mostly aboutCoastermelt) and 41: Pink Universes Die Really Quickly (mostly about FadeCandy).
Micah mentioned Boldport and the kit-of-the-month club. (Video of her building the first one!) Also: the BigClive channel on YouTube.
Thank you to Planet.com for sponsoring the contest. Check out Planet.com/careers!
Philip Freidin (@PhilipFreidin) spoke with us about his BLE platform OSHChip, debuggers, and consulting.
Planet Labs is sponsoring a contest! Hit the contact link to enter. Also check out their careers page and apply to [email protected].
Both the OSHChip and the CMSIS-DAP SWD programming module are on Philip's Tindie store. While Keil is the suggested compiler for now, you can also use mbed (tutorial). The system is wholly open source, you can find everything at github.com/oshchip. (Philip gave anHDDG talk about OSHChip; we didn't talk about it but I thought it was interesting.)
Philip's company is Fliptronics. Under Tips and Tricks, that site has his advice on consulting.
Kelly McEvers (@kellymcevers) joins us to talk about the definition of embedded. Kelly McEvers is one of the hosts of All Things Considered, NPR's award-winning afternoon news magazine. She is also the host of a new podcast called Embedded which takes a story from the news and goes much deeper into it.
Her Embedded podcast launches on March 31st. Subscribe now on iTunes, listen onNPR.com or your favorite podcast app.
Kelly's Diary of a Bad Year: A War Correspondent's Dilemma is an amazing listen.
Kelly mentioned her interview of a drone pilot, Lt. Col. T. Mark McCurley, author of Hunter Killer. She also interviewed Sarah Pennypacker, author of Pax.
Elecia does not squee on air. But it was a near thing.
Christopher and Elecia chat about the Hackaday prize, Unity class (and their games), the blog, hams, and IDEs.
Embedded.fm blog posts we discussed:
Sign up for the Embedded.fm newsletter to get blog content in your email box.
Hackaday Prize! Yay! Sign up early and often.
Chris and Elecia have been taking a Unity course on Udemy (pricing becomes more sensible after April 1). Elecia's game is live for the next 30 days, you can play it from your computer's browser (but not Chrome). Audio "enhances" the experience. Also: you were warned.
Atomic Game Engine is another game engine but open source.
Justin has 8 reels of 800 of Atmel AT32UC3A3256S-ALVR. Let us know if you'd like to be connected.
Elecia liked the Ed Emberley Make A World drawing book.
Bipedal robots at RobotShop.com for software programming or SparkFun's Redbot kit for more hardware oriented fun.
If you missed last year's April Fools Embedded.fm: The Elon Musk of Earth. Feel free to listen to it again on April 1 as there will be no such gag this year.
Dan Luu (@danluu) spoke with us about processor features, startups vs large companies, error handling, and computer science research.
Dan's blog is danluu.com. Some posts we talked about:
Dan mentioned some conference proceedings he monitors. For computer architecture:
For software engineering:
He also mentioned Operating System Design and Implementation OSDI: https://www.usenix.org/conferences/byname/179
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 Roads, her YouTube channel, and/or herRobotic Arts blog.
Some other topics we discussed:
Also, please check out our new embedded.fm/blog or if you prefer email updates, sign up atembedded.fm/subscribe.
Julia Evans (@b0rk) spoke with us about using profile analysis to debug programs.
Her PyCon 2015 talk was Systems Programming as a Swiss Army Knife (video).
Julia's blog is jvns.ca. Some of the posts we discussed include:
Julia's favorite conference to speak at is Bang Bang Con in New York City, May 7-8, 2016. Coincidentally, the call for proposals is open.
Also, please check out the Embedded.fm/blog!
Andrew "Bunnie" Huang spoke with us about manufacturing in China, writing books, and crowdfunding.
Bunnie's new book is The Essential Guide to Electronics in Shenzhen. It is available via crowdsupply and the price goes from $30 to $35 when pre-ordering ends on March 17, 2016.
Bunnie's blog is at www.bunniestudios.com, many of his professional projects can be found at www.kosagi.com including more information about the Novena open source laptop.
Hacking the XBox is available for free from No Starch Press.
Andrei Chichak and Chris Svec join us to talk about our new blog: Embedded.fm/blog (!!).
Andrei was on 114: Wild While Loops, about error handling, as well 99: You Can Say A Boat, about MISRA-C. Andrei has been teaching Embedded Wednesdays, an embedded systems class for the Edmonton New Technology Society. It uses the STM32F401C-Discoveryboard. His course materials are on his site (chichak.ca).
Chris was on 78: Happy Cows, about empathy driven development. He's also working on a different embedded systems introduction (Embedded Software Engineering 101). His blog ischrissvec.com.
Our new blog will include their coursework, excepts from Elecia's new book on taking apart toys, project notes from Christopher, and various other news.
Chris (@stoneymonster) and Elecia (@logicalelegance) answer listener questions about BASIC and their meet-cute story. (Sadly those are unrelated. That would have been cute.)
Dennis Jackson at Airware is looking for a senior EE and an EE technician. Contact us and we'll connect you to Dennis so he knows to look out for you. Dennis' episode was 94: Don't Be Clever about drones, simple code, and learning.
As for other interviews, Elecia was on The Amp Hour and The Engineering Commons Podcast. Elecia and Chris were both on The Amp Hour's 256th show.
Dan Saks answers many questions about C++ in embedded systems: where it works, where it doesn't, and a path to getting started.
Dan Saks is the founder and president of Saks & Associates. He was a columnist for The C/C++ Users Journal, Embedded Systems Design and several other publications. He also served as secretary of the ANSI and ISO C++ standards committee in its early years.
We touched on some of his articles:
Andrei suggested Sams Teach Yourself C++ in One Hour a Day, Seventh Edition by Siddhartha Rao as a good primer for experienced C programmers reluctantly learning C++.
Like robots? Check out the job postings at iRobot. If you like what you see, email Chris Svec. (Yes, the guy who was on 78: Happy Cows.)
Contest for Making Embedded Systems will end Feb 5, 2016.
Inventor and Youtube-er, Simone Giertz (@SimoneGiertz) tells us about building robots to "help" her daily life.
Simone's YouTube Channel. Some of the videos discussed in the show:
Simone's blog, with additional robot build details is at simonegiertz.com.
For relaxation, Simone visits the Hello Denizen YouTube channel and watches hamsters eating gourmet meals. She also mentioned her preferred Reddit feed.
Like robots? Check out the job postings at iRobot. If you like what you see, email Chris Svec. (Yes, the guy who was on 78: Happy Cows.)
Contest for Making Embedded Systems will end Feb 5, 2016.
Anh Bui, Vice President of @Benetech Labs, joined us to discuss using technology for good.
Benetech is most widely known for Bookshare, an online library for people with print disabilities. Note that this is only open to people with print disabilities per the Chafee Amendment (copyright exceptions with cause). There are some public domain books you can search through on the site.
Martus is another of Benetech's core programs, in their human rights and civil liberties program. It is an open source, secure information collection and management tool.
Poet Image Description Tool is a Benetech tool to aid in making visuals more accessible to everyone.
Some accessibility guidelines and techniques:
Enabling The Future is the group that 3D prints prosthetic limbs.The Dean Kamen water filtration system is called Slingshot.
Hackaday Prize (2016 announcement is coming!)
For more information about the embedded software position at Avid Identification Systems, please email Mark (Engineering Manager) and CC Karen (HR Manager).
Eric Hankinson (@Kumichou) tells us about the new embedded software components ofContextual Electronics. There is a 10% coupon announced in the show, good until June.
CE uses the ST-Nucleo-F030R8 board.
Eric's blog is www.erichankinson.com and his day job is at LeanDog.
The Amp Hour episode with Chris and Elecia is 281: Crossovers and Call-ins
Christopher (@stoneymonster) and Elecia (@logicalelegance) inflict lightning round on each other, talk about their new favorite toys, and get momentarily serious about performance reviews.
Elecia is looking for a datasheet for the SunPlus SPHE8104GW. Not the 8200. This is not something Google-able. It probably requires knowing the right person, but if you do (or if you are the right person), please help.
Tickle is the IOS app to program the Sphero BB-8 (and many other robots) in the kids programming language Scratch
Automatic: BLE car monitoring
The Cheerson CX-10 is the base model quadcopter Elecia and Chris have been playing with. They flew a CX-10C with its 0.3MP video camera off a cliff at beach (but it didn't record the video).
Elecia's self-evaluation for 2014 year is on her blog
Python library for mashing binaries into other forms is IntelHex
Elecia couldn't find the .map file scripts she was thinking of though one on stackoverflow was pretty close
FIRST Robotics is way to get students of all ages into robotics. Former participant and dedicated mentor, Michael Hill (@Michael_A_Hill) tells us about FIRST and how we can get involved.
Official site: FIRSTInspires.org which also has a list of volunteer roles and qualifications
Forums are at ChiefDelphi.com
This year's theme is FIRST STRONGHOLD and was designed in collaboration with Disney. There is a trailer on YouTube (expect castles!).
One of the NI control units is the RoboRIO (not the nearly-already-a-robot RIO Robot we linked to initially, thank you Alan Anderson!)
Micheal's team is Innovators Robotics.
Chris and Elecia will be helping out on The Amp Hour call in show, recording January 6,2015. If you'd like to chat, hit our contact link or email [email protected]. Please include your name, location, Skype name and what you hope to discuss on air.
Sarah and Abi Hodsdon speak with us about being a maker family.
Sarah's site and blog are Sarahndipitous Designs, her twitter handle is @sarahndipitous.
The online K-12 school they use is Connections Academy.
Making Makers by AnnMarie Thomas is a book about encouraging kids toward making.
Backyard Ballistics by William Gurstelle is an excellent addition to any library.
Giwishes is a massive global scavenger hunt.
Some learning sites the Hodsdon's recommend include:
For e-textiles and wearables, they recommend:
Alvaro Prieto (@alvaroprieto) spoke with us about laser turrets, tearing down quadcopters, flux capacitors, the moon, and culture at work.
Alvaro's github repositories including Proto-X quadcopter information, Silta bus monitoring, and Skype video message exporter for OSX.
One of the inspirations for taking apart the Proto-X was watching Micah talk about herCoastermelt project. We talked to her about it on episode 101: Taking Apart the Toaster.
One of his reasons for going to Planet Labs was knowing Shaun Meehan, check out his Amp Hour interview.
Daemon by Daniel Suarez
Video of Supercon talk on laser shooting robots
Podcast Award nominations open in early 2016
Matt's Spartan 6 FPGA shield is on the Hackaday Store. Its build process is documented on Hackaday.io. You can see Matt's other projects on Hackaday.io/matt.
Matt works for SupplyFrame.
Wishbone is the open source bus system that Elecia likened to ARM's AHB/APB.
Simon Monk (@simonmonk2) talks with us about zombies and writing books.
Simon has 20+ books out, check out his Amazon author page or his web page for a full listing (simonmonk.org). Some you might want sooner rather than later include:
30 Arduino Projects for the Evil Genius
Kits for building some of the projects from Simon's books can be found at Monk Makes. (@monkmakes).
🐔=🦃+1 (or Why isn't there a duck emoji?)
Christopher and Elecia talk about languages, twitter, listener emails, and Star Wars.
The Amp Hour talked about languages, they also referenced this compiler writing exercise
C alternative tokens iso646.h and an up to date C reference (Harbison and Steele)
$20 Linux board from vocore.io
Real Strawberry DNA extraction technique (Elecia forgot the soap and the salt.) fromScientific American (with real science) or in easy-to-follow picture form on genome.gov.
Dan Shapiro (@danshapiro), CEO of Glowforge (@glowforge), speaks with us about laser cutters and his book, The Hot Seat.
If you succumb to the wonder of 3D laser printers, consider using our Glowforge link so you get $100 (and we get $100).
Dan's book, the one Elecia gushes about, is The Hot Seat: The Startup CEO Guidebook. Some of that information is also found in Dan's blog.
If you are in the Seattle area, Glowforge is hiring! Check out their jobs page.
We didn't talk much about Robot Turtles, a game to teach programming principles to preschoolers.(Also on Amazon.)
There is another interesting interview with Dan at Tested.com.
Windell Oskay (@Oskay) of Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories (@EMSL) told us about co-authoring a book: The Annotated Build-It-Yourself Science Laboratory.
Some great EMSL links:
The book Chris brought up was Thinking Physics.
Windell is also on Google Plus.
Contest to get Windell's signed book ends 11/13, send in your entry!
Bob Coggeshall (@BobCoggeshall) runs a boutique assembly house. And he co-wrote sudo. There are sandwich jokes.
Bob's business is Small Batch Assembly (@SmallBatchA). (There might be a discount on your first order near the end of the show. Maybe.) His pick and place machine is a Mancorp MC400.
Octopart's Common Parts Library
We mentioned OSHPark a few times, Laen has been on Embedded.fm: 92: Everybody Behave, Please
Boldport makes nonlinear traces (SEAHORSE!!)
How did we not know about Astromech.net?
Bob's Wifi Nixie driver board (also: how Nixie tubes work)
Chris and Elecia try out their new recording location, give advice for getting a job in embedded software, and respond to listener emails.
SparkFun's Pit of Despair is a blog post about how to create products from prototypes.
Visual Studio has plug-ins that support microprocessors, see Visual Micro.
The Guardian reports that 2016 VW models have a different defeat.
We spoke with Fran Blanche (@contourcorsets) of Frantone about guitar tone.
Fran has several articles and posts about space, electronics, and assorted whatnot at her design writings page. Her video blog is on YouTube.
There are many different guitar pedals you can build for yourself as a way to get a better handle on analog electronics. Elecia found these at Mammoth Electronics.
The song that was the first to have flanging was "The Big Hurt" by Toni Fisher in 1959.
Kathleen Sidenblad discusses her career through Silicon Valley, from engineer at Systems Control Inc in 1976 to VP of Engineering today.
For more about Kathy, check out this Storehouse interview.
Ben Krasnow of the Applied Science YouTube channel talks with us about scanning electron microscopes, generating liquid nitrogen, and cookies.
Hackaday Conference is Nov 14-15, 2015 in SF, CA! Call for proposals. (Ben and Elecia are Hackaday Prize Judges.)
Contact Ben through twitter: @BenKrasnow
Applied Science YouTube channel (and don't forget the associated Patreon). Some specific videos we talked about:
Other people's videos and projects:
Amscope microscope and low cost hot air rework soldering station
Morgan Allen (@captain_morgan) spoke with us about Sphero and Node.JS. This is all not-so-secretly a discussion of the BB8 robot.
Correction: Despite Elecia's repeated insistence that these are steppers, she's just wrong. The motors are DC which only makes sense in a consumer product. More details on this in a later episode.
BB8s from Amazon (probably won't arrive until next year)
More info on Elecia's teardown and talk: embedded.fm/hddg
The BB8 toy is based on Sphero (buy). They have an open SDK and a wonderful education program. Check out the clear SPRK (buy). It also has a teach-your-kids-to-program app that is pretty neat (but doesn't seem to work with BB8 yet).
Morgan has been involved with NodeBots (@nodebotsSF). They use Node.js (wiki) to send Bluetooth serial commands to Spheros. Their issues list is where new meetups are posted.
Johnny-Five is also a popular way to do computer based robotics with an Arduino (or other dev board) as a hardware intermediary.
IPFS: Distributed file system
ESPruino is a Javascript board.
People's Open: Free Wireless Internet and Local Network in Oakland, California. Also in Oakland, check out Sudo Room hackerspace.
Chris and Elecia discuss listener emails and other assorted topics.
BLE 4.2 writeup from EETimes and the FAQ from Bluetooth.org
Drones should follow existing aviation keep out standards (Nick links us to some wiki pages)
Glenn Scott (@GlennCScott) spoke with us about API design and techniques for writing good software.
Glenn glossed over his bio but it is quite impressive. You can reach him via his PARC page.
PARC's Content Centric Networking home: ccnx.org which we talked about in 75: End Up in a Puppy Fight.
Literate Programming by Knuth
And the more recommended Bob Martin's books
While latest source code requires licensing, the binary version of CCN includes the LongBow tools (in user/local/parc/bin). Description of tools and doxygen docs. The LongBow getting started guide should be part of the mid-September binary release.
Daniel Hienzsch (@rheingoldheavy) spoke with us about reverse engineering a board, bypass capacitors, and serial protocols.
Rheingold Heavy is Dan's company for educational boards. The one he started with was the I2C and SPI education board (its fulfilled kickstarter page). He brought us the theGraphic Equalizer Kit and Bubble Display Experimentation Pack.
Dan's Arduino from Scratch blog series looks at the Arduino hardware in great detail.
Contextual Electronics course for learning to build boards
Chris wrote about his Photon based garage door opener on the Linker blog
TinEye for searching schematic snippets
Andrei Chichak rejoins us to discuss error handling.
Andrei's website says how to reach him or email embedded 'at' chichak.ca
Windows 10 "Something Happened" error
Book Elecia mentioned: Kindness of Strangers by Mike McIntyre
Elecia's book covers logging module in Creating a System Architecture (pp 21-25)
Clive Turvey (Clive1), master of the ST Forums, talks with us about ARM cores and answering difficult technical questions for fun.
Some answers:
Books (though we talked more about these being good authors, these are the ones Chris and Elecia have or want):
A bare metal Scheme interpreter for ARM.
Chris (@stoneymonster) and Elecia (@logicalelegance) chat with each other about drones, listener emails, conferences, fighting robots, and moonlighting.
Elecia's Solid talk, an Introduction to Inertial Sensors is on youtube.
Washington Post article about Amazon's good drone behavior
Apple's IOS security guide (Elecia's security checklist)
Photon WiFi Module (Chris' Linker articles part one and part two)
DAB+ FM Digital Radio Development Board
Sad autonomous fighting robot video and lightning fast autonomous sumo bots video
OpenSCAD- CAD tool suggested by a listener
Light painting pictures (500px)
Natalie Silvanovich (@natashenka) discussed reverse engineering hardware, working on security software, and the fantastic world of Tamagotchis.
Original CCC 2012 talk: Many Tamagotchis Were Harmed in the Making of this Presentation
CCC 2013 talk: Even More Tamagotchis Were Harmed in the Making of this Presentation
Natalie's upcoming BlackHat talk: Attacking ECMAScript Engines with Redefinition
Flash exploit article for Project Zero: One Perfect Bug: Exploiting Type Confusion in Flash
Tamagotchis are still available as are the works of Shel Silverstein (Snowball is in Falling Up).
BeagleBone's Jason Kridner (@Jadon) returns to tell us about his new book.
Jason co-authored a new book: BeagleBone Cookbook: Software and Hardware Problems and Solutions (or at O'Reilly). His older book is Bad to the Bone: Crafting Electronics Systems with Beaglebone and BeagleBone Black.
Previous Embedded.fm episode 60: Fun Things You Can Make out of Beagles
BeagleBoard.org's Google Summer of Code page (including BeagleSat and underwater drones!)
Some information about putting Xenomai on a BeagleBone Black for real time response.
Chris mentioned Brillo, an alternative Google supported OS that isn't on the BBB.
Project Ara: an open source smartphone
Ardupilot: Autonomous drone piloting.
Dronecode: Drones in Linux
OpenROV: Underwater vehicles
Mars lander Beagle 2 (the Apollo 11 Lunar Module was the Eagle despite some comical confusion). [UPDATE: Listener Mark Stevens pointed out that the Apollo 10 Lunar Module was named Snoopy who was a beagle.]
James Grenning (@jwgrenning) returns to discuss TDD, Agile, and web courses.
James was on Embedded.fm episode 30: Eventually Lighting Strikes.
James' new company is Wingman Software.
His excellent book is TDD for Embedded C.
James suggested Training From the Back of the Room! as resource to people looking to put together a class. He uses and recommends CyberDojo as a coding instruction tool.
Before Agile was Agile-for-business, it was Extreme Programming. James recommends Extreme Programming Explained.
James will be the keynote speaker at AgileDC in October.
Jen (@RebelbotJen) joined Chris and Elecia to discuss security, privacy, and ethics in wearable computing.
Elecia's Linker post is especially relevant this week: Device Security Checklist..
There is already a standard for privacy and security: HIPAA (Title II). While not easy to read, it is a reasonable starting place. Another good (but not quite on-point) resource is the EFF Secure Messaging Scorecard, especially if you consider your device as messaging your user (it's a metaphor, ok?). Also, read all the way to the methodology, not just the pretty checkboxes.
Mike Ryan has great explanations for how to easily crack BLE security. Video to watch. His website has more resources, papers, videos, tools.
The Embedded Systems Conference (Silicon Valley) will be held at the Santa Clara convention center July 20-22.
Casino article: Breaking the House
Chris and Elecia were guests on The Amp Hour.
Jen is interested in putting together a workshop/conference on the intersection of art, dance, and technology. Contact her on Twitter or email info at rebelbots dot com.
We talked to Craig Cook about learning embedded systems. He recently attended an embedded edX course through University of Texas.
The microcontroller and boards used in the course
Craig's next course will be Interactive Python through Coursera
As we discussed Craig's alarm clock we mentioned many parts including:
Chris has also been looking at Particle.io's Photon board for WiFi + cloud development. This will be mentioned on other shows (as well as on The Amp Hour).
Chris and Elecia talk about satellites, survey results, and entertainment.
ESP8266 has an Arduino IDE (thanks, Karl!)
Elecia will be speaking at Solid June 25th and ESC July 22nd.
To celebrate the first 100 episodes, Elecia made a spreadsheet of all the guests and topics.
Chris read and recommended Neal Stephenson's Seveneves. He was ambivalent about the latest incarnation of battlebots.
Manny Wright of Cortus spoke with us about developing processor IP and how it goes from RTL to silicon.
Cortus development platform with a Xilinx Spartan and Arduino Due compatibility.
Planet Labs satellite contest winners are announced and Elecia has a cold.
Atmel’s Andreas Eieland (@AndreasMCUguy) spoke with us about low power chips and benchmarks, including tips for measuring and achieving the lowest power possible.
EEMBC has a low power benchmark: ULPBench. EETimes wrote up a great introduction to the benchmark. Atmel’s SAM-L posted some excellent numbers for ULPBench.
Chris wanted to look at processors between Cortex-M4 and phone chips. Andreas suggested the SAM7, SAM E, and Cortex-A5.
Programmable logic blocks (Look Up Tables)
Coding tips and tricks for AVR micros (most things apply for all embedded development)
App Note: Ultra Low Power Techniques
App Note: Performance Levels and Power Domains
Andreas was also on Episode 15: Robot on the Front, speaking about how the AVR processor line came to life, why there is an AVR in Arduino, and the spirit of making things.
The Planet contest ends Friday June 12 (at midnight your time). Check out their jobs and send in your contest entry.
Also, check out Elecia’s BLE Intro.
Mark VanderVoord (@mvandervoord) spoke with us about leading open source projects and test driven development.
His site is ThrowTheSwitch.org, a good place to get started with test driven development. Get more info (and a coupon) for his course. Mark's book is Embedded Testing with Unity and CMock.
Lengthy list of unit testing frameworks for C
Why's Guide to Learning Ruby (free! with entertaining comics!)
Charles Lohr spoke with us about $5 WiFi (ESP8266), hacking as a hobby, arcade games, and music visualization.
Updated 06/02/2015: A listener pointed out that the Arduino IDE can program the ESP8266, probably an easier setup than Charles' original article. Also, the Linker post for this show is about getting started with BLE.
Follow Charles on YouTube (or say hello on Google+ and Hackaday.io). To get you started, here are Elecia's favorites:
For more about the ESP8266:
ST 9 axis inertial measurement unit LSM9DSO
Micah Elizabeth Scott (@scanlime) spoke with us about Coastermelt, art installations, FadeCandy, teaching electronics to artists, and mental health.
Her Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) installation is mesmerizing, some videos.
In her Coastermelt project, Micah uses the IDA disassembler.
FadeCandy is for sale at Adafruit.
Zen Photon is online, demonstrating ray tracing.
Micah's website shows her current projects.
Micah's previous Embedded.fm episode focused on FadeCandy: 41: Pink Universes Die Really Quickly.
Robot Odyssey looks awesome.
Captain Awkward is a site where you can get advice on how to say things and deal with difficult situations/people.
Micah's shop has a TypeA 3D printer (note: Tuco's favorite bolts) as well as an OtherMill.
Star Simpson (@starsandrobots) and Jen Costillo (@RebelbotJen) catch up with Elecia and Chris, discussing how hobby projects have changed over the last two years since the show started.
Jen's website: RebelBot
Star's website and weekly drone newsletter The Buzzer. Star works at Orion (formerly OnBeep).
Novena board and Star's project Balboa
Crowd supply and What it took to make the Octopart reference card
Andrei Chichak spoke with us about MISRA-C and ethics.
Linker post: It's dangerous to go alone! Take MISRA-C
Embedded.fm listener survey (please!)
Andrei's has personal website (we failed to talk about his kite aerial photography, it is really neat though) and his company is CBF Systems.
Plum Hall C Compiler Validation
JPL Coding Standards for C (and the mentioned video discussing Mars Code)
ISO 26262 Automobile software standard
Cortex-R for high reliability systems (ARM's description)
National Society of Professional Engineers code of ethics and Canadian EngineeringGuidelines on the Code of Ethics
Offline, Andrei recommended two books and another podcast about MISRA:
Chris and Elecia talk about memetics, learning, and processors.
Elecia was coy about the Pasadena party May 9th and 10th, but Hackaday announced it so you can invite yourself. She will also be speaking at the Solid conference in June in SF (email for a coupon!). She'll also be at ESC-Silicon Valley in July.
Star Wars Teaser #2 and SpaceX almost-landing
BLE fun: TI's CC2640 and Nordic nRF51822 (Elecia likes the BLE Nano with the free, online mbed compiler for getting started with the nRF5122).
Everything seems to be a Cortex-M0 these days (including the aforementioned CC2640 and nRF51822). The new Atmel SAM-L series is Cortex-M0 and even more low power than usual. On the other hand, the MSP432 is low power and is a more powerful Cortex-M4 (and inexpensive dev kits!),
Elecia has a book: Making Embedded Systems. It makes a great gift.
Professor Paul Fishwick joined us to talk about CS and STEM education, excellent analogies, and the crossover of art and technology.
The Linker post related to this episode managed to be reasonably topical for a change.
Paul's work:
Forrester System Dynamics
Max is a visual programming language for music and multimedia.
CS Unplugged is a collection of free learning activities that teach Computer Science through engaging games and puzzles that use cards, string, crayons and lots of running around.
There are many bubblesort dance videos (mindboggling) but this is the one Elecia knew about previously.
The Computer History Museum is awesome. If you are in the area, you should definitely go.
Conference and contact notes:
Carrie Sundra (@AlpenglowYarn) spoke with us about doing a Kickstarter on her own… and nearly failing.
The SkeinMinder is an automation tool for small yarn businesses (and enthusiastic amateurs). When the successful Kickstarter nearly fell short, Carrie candidly wrote about it (includes a great description of the economies of scale).
Carrie’s yarn company is Alpenglow Yarn. You can use the contact page there to ask for electrical engineering help as well. Carrie is active on Instagram and her blog is a blend of crafts and engineering.
Ravelry is the social media site for knitters and crocheters (requires free account to see anything)
The insanely popular Potato Salad Kickstarter.
This week we discuss lasers, internet of things, and static electricity. Our extremely opinionated guest has a lot to say, including some scatological humor.
The associated Linker post went up early for this one, please check it out.
The linker post for this episode is Be Excellent to Each Other.
Dennis Jackson spoke with us about drones (and Airware), simple code, and learning.
Hobbyist drones and UAVs on Amazon: tiny and cheap, medium (Christopher's gift), andplease-I'm-drooling-right-now. Only the last one may be an Airware platform (Dennis could neither confirm nor deny).
Airware's breakdown of proposed FAA rules
Simple code:
Dennis has also worked on DEKA's iBOT and at Avinger's OCT system.
Dennis had a list of suggested articles and blogs on safety critical software development:
Dennis' other suggested reading (ongoing blogs):
The Linker post for this episode is RTOSs and Brownies.
Joel Sherrill (@JoelSherrill) spoke with us about real time operating systems, free and open source software, interns, and space.
Google Summer of Code (the FAQ is the best part!) and ESA Summer of code (awesome tagline: In space no one can hear you code).
The LEON is the ESA Sparc core with open source VHDL and extensive use by ESA.
Some projects RTEMS is used on include the Magnetosphere Multiscale Mission, theExPRESS Logistics Carrier, Mars Curiosity, and the Dawn spacecraft that is visiting the Ceres asteroid.
The Linker post for this episode: Make Anything
James @Laen Neal from OSHPark spoke with us about starting a business, helping open source hardware, and throwing wild parties.
OSHPark got its start from DorkbotPDX.
If you are in Portland, Oregon, check out their meetup (started out on Mondays, now first Tuesday of the month, look at the CymaSpace meetup calendar for the Maker Meetup).
Open Source Hardware Association (OSHA)
Bay Area Maker Faire 2015 is May 16-17, Bring a Hack dinner is usually Sunday.
This time we really did talk about the Maker Pro book.
The Linker post for this episode: How to Win the Hackaday Prize (and Other Design Challenges)
Sophi Kravitz, electrical engineer and Hackaday Mythical Creature, came on to leak the new Hackaday Prize details!
On twitter, she's @SophiKravitz and often has the reins of @HackadayPrize.
Sophi mentioned Matt Berggren's PCB workshop (oh! and a Solid talk too!). All three of us have been trying to make time for Contextual Electronics (now with fewer time constraints!).
HardwareCon (startup conference in San Leandro, CA)
Soft Robotics Kit (and contest)
The balloon project is going to FITC. You can hear the soothing sounds here.
Sophi rejoins us after being on Episode 77: Goldfish, Fetch My Slippers. Also, we forgot to discuss it but Sophi was an author in the Maker Pro book, full of neat essays.
The Linker post for this Episode: Solving a Different Problem
ThingM's Tod Kurt (@todbot) joined us to talk about the most important part of every embedded system: blinking lights.
ThingM has been making I2C lights (BlinkM, MinM and MaxM) since 2006.
The newer, more productized USB light is the Blink(1) (there is a coupon near the end of the show). Blink(1) had two successful kickstarters (second one).
The BlinkMs have an ATTiny85 (which is also on the Adafruit Trinket). The Blink(1)s have a PIC processor that is small, cheap, and supports USB quite well (PIC16F1455-I/ML and dev kit).
Other smart LEDs include WS28xx (aka NeoPixel) and APA102 (aka DotStar)
Seeed Studio was discussed as a way to get boards built, assembled, even housed. Elecia mentioned Tindie's new CM review site.
Tod is cofounder of Crash Space (@CrashSpaceLA), a Los Angeles based hackspace. They (including Tod) were on the short-lived Mythbusters-hosted Rube Goldberg devices show called Unchained Reaction.
Tod has worked on some neat art projects, including the Crystal Monster and the Cash Machine.
Speaking of blogs, Chris and Elecia are going to start writing after (podcast) action reports forElement 14. More announcements (and actual links) soon.
Don't forget the Chris Savage (Parallax) call for assistance!
Chris Savage (@SavageCircuits) talks about building a community and about stopping projects when life intrudes.
His site is Savage Circuits. He has a YouTube channel. He has Savage Circuit TV which are the longer, more in depth videos and Short Circuit for the shorter ones. Also see his forums.
Chris works for Parallax and had some kit suggestions: BOE-BOT (board of education bot), its successor the ActivityBot, and the ELEV-8 Quadcopter Kit. Chris is also a writer for Nuts and Volts.
At the top of the show, we mentioned Chris' wife. Here is Ken Gracey's request for help. Or you can skip that and use the PayPal link on the Savage Circuits thank you page. (No PayPal account required.)
Same day PCBs?!? Danielle Applestone (@dapplestone) chatted with Chris and Elecia about desktop CNC milling using @OtherMachine's OtherMill.
OtherMill links:
Synthetos TinyG controller (also see the Make write up about TinyG)
BANT (budget, authority, need, timing): more info
Chip Gracey spoke with us about founding @ParallaxInc, chip design, and the Propeller with its many cores.
Some notes on open sourcing the Propeller
Elecia has a very old Propeller Starter kit but is tempted to get the PropStick USB.
Many years ago, Chris got a Basic Stamp 2 module (like this one) to control a camera in his RC airplane:
Erin McKean (@emckean) is a lexicographer, programmer, and start-up founder. We spoke to her about Wordnik (the online uber dictionary), Reverb (smarter recommendations), and her many books.
Erin has written many books, some about words, one about dresses (The Hundred Dresses), and one fiction novel about The Secret Lives of Dresses. She has also given two TED talks.
Brian Garner talks about skunked words in his book Modern American Usage
Five Intriguing Things via Tiny Letter [Feb 2, 2015: This link is broken today but it is the right link, google "Five Intriguing Things" to see if they've fixed it.]
Elecia's Wordy project if fully documented over on Hackaday
Scott Miller built a hula hoop with Bluetooth, an inertial measurement unit, a 32-bit processor, an 8-bit processor, and a slew of individually addressable LEDs. It makes wild patterns when you move.
Scott's "normal" company, with all of its ham radio equipment, is Argent Data Systems. The hula hoops are Hyperion Hoops.
You can buy a hoop. They are also on Facebook or you can watch the mesmerizing lightshow on YouTube (also here and here).
Yes, the hula hoop does speak DMX512, doesn't everybody?
The founders of Bluestamp Engineering spoke with us about running a hands-on summer engineering program for high school students (while keeping their day jobs).
Bluestamp website, Twitter (@BlueStampEng), YouTube channel full of student projects and Facebook page.
Dave Young (@daveyoungEE) is also the principal engineer at Young Circuit Design.
Robin Mansukhani is also CEO of Alzeca. Robin also gave a TED talk about learning by doing.
Raman Pi creator Mark Johnson (@flatCat_) spoke with us about spectrometers, 3D printing, and competing in the Hackaday Prize.
Raman Pi project on Hackaday.io
Hackaday prize semi-finalist video
Mike Szczys' Fl@c@ bio on Hackaday.com
Open Source Fusor Research Consortium
Wikipedia: spectrometer, Raman spectroscopy, fusors, and optical coherence tomography
Weird Stuff is a Bay area electronics surplus store
Raman Pi also has its own website
Jen, Chris, and Elecia talk about the movies that influenced them to go into engineering.
Choose Your Own Adventure books (Amazon, wiki)
Star Trek: The Next Generation (imdb, Amazon)
321 Contact, show and magazine (imdb (tv))
The Muppets Show (imdb, Amazon)
Phineas and Ferb (imdb, Amazon)
Sisterhood of Spies (Amazon)
Crytonomicon (Amazon)
Chris and Elecia babble up a show about gifts, conferences, and makers.
Embedded Systems Conference is put on by UBM. The conference is in Boston May 6-7, 2015, Santa Clara July 20-22, and Minneapolis November 4-5. The Santa Clara proposal deadline is January 9th.
O'Reilly's Solid Conference is June 22-25 in San Francisco. Proposals are due January 12th.
Kerbal Space Program and some controllers and telemetry boards from other people
CrossyRoad is on iOS and Android (This is bad, do not start. Also unihorse is the best!)
Elecia's Wordy project on Hackaday
Magnetoception in humans is controversial (wiki) but the magnetometer/motor anklet is neat.
Bill Winterberg (@BillWinterberg) chatted with Elecia about leaving embedded engineering to become a financial planner then to being a technology adviser to other financial planners.
Bill's company is FPPad. You can subscribe to his newsletter and watch Bits and Bytes, his video blog (or read it).
Bill and Elecia met at LeapFrog. Bill was instrumental in making the original LeapPad Learning System.
When Elecia mentioned Domini Social Investments, Bill mentioned Vanguard Total Stock Market.
Get a Financial Life: Personal Finance In Your Twenties and Thirties
Financial adviser networks:
Robo-advisor (automated investment management)
Bill says: "It shouldn't be this hard for smart engineers."
Chris Svec (@christophersvec) has an idea about adding empathy to software development. It is a good idea.
His blog is Said Svec. He works for iRobot and they are hiring. (Chris' email is given toward the end of the show but if you hit the contact link here, we'll pass along info to him.)
Embedded has an episode devoted to impostor syndrome.
O'Reilly's Head First book series is pretty awesome.
Elecia is still talking about Thinking, Fast and Slow as a great way to understand brains. Chris Svec also recommends Make It Stick.
The Richard Hamming quote came from his address to the Naval Postgraduate School. The whole lecture is available on YouTube.
Sophi Kravitz (@SophiKravitz, G+) joined us to talk about working on neat things: Wobble World, Oculus Rift, Unity, goldfish training, and BlueStamp Engineering.
Sophi's company is Mix Engineering
Leap Motion vs. Microsoft Kinect
Quit Your Day Job on Element14, previously on Super Green Dot
Ron Sparks (@txNgineer, AG5RS) spoke with us about the convergence of makers and ham radio enthusiasts.
The alternative internet: AMPRNet (wiki) aka 44 net
South Texas Balloon Launch Team
SatNOGS (their site, their hackaday entry, and the video Elecia liked)
Weak Signal Propagation Reporter Network ("whisper"). Also on wiki.
Glenn Scott and Nacho Solis spoke with Elecia about content-centric networking, being research scientists, and working at PARC.
[Note: Elecia was the recording engineer and her inexperience showed by not hitting that other little button on the software. Nacho's mic ended up bad but Chris mostly fixed it... the sound gets better after the first five minutes.]
Twitter: Nacho (@isolis), CCN (@projectccnx), and PARC (@PARCInc)
CCNX website (includes contact link)
CCN enabled Riot OS
John Schuch (@JohnS_AZ) talked with us about being a semifinalist in the Hackaday Prize, his project, and entering other contests.
Winning Entry on Mouser 500 Challenge
Honorable Mention on Circuit Cellar's ChipKit2012
Many contests are announced on Circuit Cellar and searching the EEVBlog forums.
IRC channel mentioned is TYMKRS
Christopher and Elecia look through listener email, check in on what past guests are up to, and consider the best and worst of science in recent fiction.
Hackaday Prize Finalists (and the 50 Semiinalists)
Saleae Logic Pro 16 (related: Drive the Boat with a Wii Mote)
Darma Kickstarter (related: Resonant Frequency of My Butt)
Peep sign up to be notified of their Kickstarter (related: Vision for Simple Minds)
EMSL Halloween round up and open house on Nov 13 (related: Mwahahaha Session)
Silicon Chef Hackathon results (related: Dancing with Hundreds of Women)
Pan-CJK fonts (related: The Tofu Problem)
The Martian (Amazon) (There is a tiny spoiler, one Elecia doesn't think merits the warning but Christopher says to skip 55:00 to 01:02:55 if you want to read the book cold.)
Don's I Snooze Remote
Emile Petrone (@emilepetrone) talked with Chris and Elecia about Tindie: buying, selling, changing the rate of hardware innovation, having a burgeoning start up, connecting government agencies to craft electronics, etc.
We talked about many amazing projects on Tindie but there were so many, it is hard to call them out. Arduboy and AirPi Raspberry Pi weather station are two that stood out.
Intellectual property attorney Judith Szepesi (@Judith_IP) discusses what Elecia (and startups) need to know about patenting.
Judith is a founding partner at HIPLegal, LLP. They will soon have a guide to addressing patent trolls (link to be added when available).
Ask Patents - a Stack Exchange site to discuss patents (and patent trolls)
Judith and Elecia both recommend the Patent It Yourself book from NOLO Press (always get the latest of this). Even if you seek legal counsel, you'll have a better idea of what should happen through the process. [Note: we got to talking after the show and Judith reminded me that if you do research for other people's patents, you should track that because you have an obligation to tell the patent office about whatever you are aware of that is relevant. -El]
Rob Faludi (@Faludi), author of Building Wireless Sensor Networks and chief innovator at Digi International, spoke with us about Zigbee, writing, and experimenting.
Books we talked about:
Mike Szczys (@Szczys) discusses @Hackaday, the SPACE! prize, being a professional musician, and visiting Silicon Valley.
Hackaday.com blog including Mike's post about Why Open Design is the way forward
Supply Frame FindChips and (upcoming) Parts.io
In response to a listener question, Elecia wrote a blog post about things to do in Silicon Valley. When Mike visited for the first time, he caught many highlights: he went toHSC/Halted, enjoying how organized it is, woke up early for the De Anza electronics flea market, and had a ball at the Computer History Museum.
Mike's Science Friday segment
Angie Chang (@thisgirlangie) joined us to talk about the coding bootcamp Hackbright Academy, their upcoming hardware hackathon, Girl Geek Dinners, and the extreme awkwardness of networking.
Sign up to be a hackathon mentor (not gender limited) or to be on the waitlist to attend (women only). Get your team together on Hackathon IO.
Sign up to be a Hackbright Academy mentor.
Oh look! Elecia signed up to speak on Sunday!
The article on Peter Thiel and women founders by Kate Losse that Chris referenced toward the end of the show.
In front of a live audience, Chris and Elecia talk about their experiences with FAA and FDA.
This show was recorded live in front of the Silicon Valley Automotive Open Source meetup group at Hacker Dojo.
The Wikipedia article on DO-178B is a good place to get an overview of the FAA process (even for other levels of concern).
For FDA, their guidance is the best place to start. Also see their 510k information. Finally, note that all class III (3, very high risk) require the more difficult Premarket Approval (PMA) process.
Everything we know about car safety certification, we learned by reading Wikipedia's ISO-26262, including Automotive Safety Integrity Level (ASIL).
Jack Ganssle's Embedded.fm episode was Being a Grownup Engineer.
Jack Gassett (@gadgetfactory) is the creator of the open source FPGA Papiliodevelopment board. He joins Chris and Elecia to answer the age-old question of how to get started with FPGAs.
Jack's company is Gadget Factory.
Chris got the Papilio Pro and Arcade MegaWing.
Recommended reading:
Chris and Elecia will be recording live at Hacker Dojo in Mountain View, CA on Monday, September 8, 2014 at 7 P.M. RSVP!
Darma (@Darma_inc) is a nascent start-up focusing on optical sensors in a seat cushion to aid in posture, stress reduction, and meditation. Chris and Elecia speak with CEO Dr. Junhao Hu and Sharif Kassatly about building a company, going through the Haxlr8r's accelerator program, and choosing a crowd funding platform.
Keep up with Darma on their webpage and on their Facebook page.
One of their advisors is NASA's Dr. Joan Vernikos, author of Sitting Kills, Moving Heals.
WHOOPS! We didn't record Elecia's mic this week and are taking a track direct from Chris' computer mic. Sound quality is not up to our normal standards. Sorry!
Chris (@stoneymonster) hosted the show, asking Elecia (@logicalelegance) what it was like to write her Making Embedded Systems book. (Thanks to Chris Svec for the request!)
Write a novel this November with NaNoWriMo
Come hear Chris and Elecia talk about writing software that can kill you at Hacker Dojo in Mountain View on Monday September 8, 2014, 7pm. Sign up!
Also, bonus quotes:
"Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing." - Benjamin Franklin
"Almost anyone can be an author; the business is to collect money and fame from this state of being." - A. A. Milne
Steve Dalton (@spidie) told us about starting a hackerspace, visiting Silicon Valley with a homebrew incubator group, and tech and fencing Australia.
Gold Coast Tech Space started off building the Rep Rap 3D printer
Steve's consulting group is Refactor
Silicon Lakes incubator just opened a call for applications to the SURF accelerator.
The Arduino-like GCDuino, available on Little Bird
Rabbits are not indigenous and not appreciated in Australia. They have the rabbit proof fenceand the Easter Billby.
Josh Bleecher Snyder (@offbymany) joined us to talk about PayPal's Beacon, being acquired, the Go programming language, BTLE, computer vision, and working at a large company after founding small ones.
Bluetooth Low Energy: A Developer's Handbook by Robin Heydon
Learning OpenCV: Computer Vision by Gary Bradski and Adrian Kaehler
Gatt is a Go package for building Bluetooth Low Energy peripherals (video description by Josh from GopherCon 2014)
Machine learning's Theano
Eigen Library for matrix math
Jen Costillo (@rebelbotJen) brings Fashion Professor Kyle Chan to discuss wearables from a different perspective.
California College of the Arts' Summer Series: Design of Wearables. Jen and Kyle's session isFashionably Practical on Wedneday, August 6th, 2014 8:15pm-10pm in San Francisco.
Sparkfun conductive ribbon and thermochromatic pigment (blue)
Athos athletic body monitoring
Cute Circuit's photonic couture
Smoke dress (neat!)
Necomimi: thought controlled cat ear headband
Reebok Checklight for detecting concussions and the Adafruit teardown
Hövding scarf airbag for cyclists
Jason Kridner (@Jadon) joined us to talk about the BeagleBone Black... and other things.
Some good books for Beagle :
BotSpeak - A programming language for internet endpoints
To contact Jason about ordering a bunch of units for your OEM use, see his contact info on BeagleBoard.org's About page.
Chris and Elecia went on vacation so this week we have music for you: the Ballistic Cats will be releasing a new album soon! If you like it, please check out the Ballistc Cats website. This album will be officially released on August 15, 2014.
Craig Sullender of ChipSight joined Elecia and Christopher to talk about machine, computer, and embedded vision.
Craig's
Peep, a camera for your door'd peephole (soon to be on Kickstarter)
O'Reilly's Practical Computer Vision with SimpleCV
Joe Grand (@JoeGrand) spoke with us about his life as Kingpin, hardware hacking, hosting a TV show, and being a Hackaday judge.
Joe's company is the Grand Idea Studio. His TV show Prototype This was on the Discovery Channel. He created an Atari game: SCSIcide. Joe will be giving his hardware hacking training at Black Hat USA in August (as well as some of the other security conferences in also Las Vegas at that time).
Joe and Elecia are on the Hackaday Prize judging panel. There are some amazing projects if you want to check out your competition (or vote for the ones you like!).
Ken Milnes talked to Elecia and Chris about his career developing augmented reality for sports broadcasting.
Matt Haines (@beardedinventor) and Tom Byrne (@tlbyrn) spoke to Elecia and Chris about Electric Imp (@electricimp). This discussion goes far beyond our first with Matt (Episode 6!). It is more software and implementation oriented than last week's Amp Hour.
In the vein of "what do I do after I've made an LED blink from a webpage?":
Finally, the SparkFun contest winner was announced. There were many great entries, choosing a winner was difficult. Ken M (@Deamiter) won the grand prize. Luckily, Matt and Tom brought two April board + Electric Imp sets to give away so Chris Svec (@christophersvec) and Alex Irvine (@EternalPractice) were runners up. Thank you to all who participated, your ideas were awesome and we loved to hear about them.
Radhika Thekkath, CEO of Agivox, joined Elecia to talk about her start up, entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley, and getting NSF SBIR grants.
Elizabeth Brenner (@eabrenner) returned to the show to talk about the are-you-ok widget that she and Elecia have been working on. (The initial problem-statement show is episode 17.)
There is now a SparkFun tutorial so you can build one of the are-you-ok widgets yourself. As announced in the show, there is a contest to get a SparkFun gift card, it ends 6/13/14 so get your answer in by then (maximum of two entries per person, please).
Elecia already took the name Sal Right out of the running (reference). In the photo below, are Maxwell, Hugh (Cation pattern!), Haley, and Grimes (from left to right) so those are all taken as well.
Noted on the show were two things El saw at the Solid Conference: 3D printed flexible materials from Kinematics and circuit stickers from Chibtronics. Also, we look forward to trying out the Fitbit channel for if-this-then-that (IFTTT) to see if that can monitor our loved ones too.
Elecia attended O'Reilly's Solid Conference, recording a few of the people she met there. Note: this episode is recorded in a noisy location.
Also, thank you to O'Reilly for giving away copies of my book.
Jack Ganssle shared his wisdom on being a good embedded software engineer (hint: it takes discipline).
Jack's website is filled with great essays and new videos. He's also written the Art of Designing Embedded Systems and The Embedded Systems Dictionary (with Michael Barr).
We covered a lot of ground, here are some of the highlights:
Elecia spoke with Micheal Worry, CEO of Nuvation, about engaging with and working at a design firm.
Disco Fish, the autonomous Burning Man party vehicle
Udacity course in autonomous vehicles
ROS is Willow Garage's robot operating system
Contact Nuvation at their website or on twitter (@Nuvation).
Contact Disco Fish and its build buddies on Facebook.
Jen Costillo (@r0b0ts0nf1r3) joins Elecia and Christopher to discuss their experiences interviewing (both as interviewer and interviewee).
Elecia did an hour long webinar on how to conduct technical interviews. In this show, she mentions a good post-interview ratings system.
Google discovered that their brainteasers are not a very effective way to interview.
Despite the news that swearing is good for you, we tried to bleep everything.
Also, it is minesweeper, not minefield. What were we thinking? It was obviously all Christopher’s fault. Though we should have stood up to him.
Elecia's book has more interview questions but from the perspective of how do you ask a question and what do you look for in a response.
Christopher White (@stoneymonster) and Elecia celebrate a year in podcasting by talking about the show. Then they decide whether or not to change the name of the show to Embedded (yes).
Elecia's list of current and soon activities:
Other things they mentioned include an amazing anti-tremor spoon, using trampolines to go to space, how drinking the blood of youth will keep you young, oil sensing, and our consulting episode.
Tenaya Hurst (@ArduinoWoman) shares her incredible enthusiasm for teaching Arduino and the San Jose's Tech Museum of Innovation (The Tech).
Being a geo-anthrop-actress, Tenaya teaches chemistry, geology, Arduino, and beginning wearables for the Tech, for their Galileo summer camp, for Oakland's Workshop Weekend, and on her own recognizance through her website.
Tenaya will be at the Linino booth at the Maker Faire in San Mateo, CA on May 17-18, 2014
Lilypad sewable (washable!) electronics
Other places to connect: @TenayaRocks, @LininoWoman, and Google+
Also noted, Elecia was interviewed in Circuit Cellar magazine, May 2014 (#286). In the first few minutes of this show, she gives a discount code for their store.
Dr. Kevin Shaw, CTO of Sensor Platforms, spoke with Elecia about his career progressing from designing MEMS to building a company that makes sensor fusion algorithms. Wandering from the Internet of Things to Singularity University to power management in Android development, Kevin and Elecia had a wide-ranging conversation.
Due in July, check out Sensor Platform's Open Sensor Platform project, an open source framework for developing sensor systems (sample timing is critical!).
Nathan Tuck joined Christopher White (@stoneymonster) and Elecia White to chat about varied topics relating to being an embedded (and graphics) engineer (and manager).
Nate works at NVidia on the Tegra K1-64. He mentioned some openings in his team at the end of the podcast, email the show to get a connection.
We also noted that Eyefluence is hiring for an EE and/or technician for work somewhere between San Jose, CA and Reno, NV. Direct resumes to Peter Milford using the email you find on their webpage (info @ ...).
We asked if managers are sociopaths.
If you haven't seen The Expert tragicomedy sketch (7 perpendicular red lines...), you need to as it is becoming engineering vernacular.
Jennelle Crothers (@jkc137) explained to Elecia what a technology evangelist does. Of course, it wasn't an embedded technology but it was still amusing. Plus, Elecia got to play with a Surface Pro.
Check out Jennelle's blog
Jennelle and Elecia met at She's Geeky in Mountain View, CA.
David Anders (Google+) joined Elecia to chat about open source hardware, what it means, how to do it, and why.
Dave will be speaking at the embedded Linux conference in San Jose, CA on April 30th:
Open Source Hardware Association describes the gradient of open source hardware.
Sigrok looks at open source and open source friendly tools
Dave works for CircuitCo, manufacturers of the mysteriously elusive BeagleBone Black. While he didn't explain their absence (other than they are super popular for OEM'ing), he did announce the brand new Intel-based MinnowBoard MAX.
Some open source tools we discussed included Tin Can Tool's 40 pin DIP Linux processor, Flyswatter, and Flyswatter 2.
Also, check out Dave's past eLinux presentations.
Josh Chan and Tarun Pondicherry, founders of Light Up (@Lightup or on Facebook), returned to the show. In episode 7, they were midway through their kickstarter, planning to make a product to teach electronics to elementary and middle school students. They've start shipping, even distributing, their MiniKits (other kits will ship soon!).
Elecia asks them if building their business and shipping the product went according to plan.
Tony Rios from MEMSIC spoke with Elecia about inertial systems and tuning algorithms used in sensor fusion (i.e. Kalman). The IMU380 will appear soon, creating a whole line of relatively inexpensive quality inertial measurement and inertial navigation systems.
Tony has a few embedded systems and algorithms positions open, for example, embedded software engineer. Email [email protected] (note you heard it in the podcast so Elecia gets brownie points).
Christopher White (@stoneymonster) and Elecia talk about the failed startups (and projects) they've been through, focusing on identifying how to discern the end is nigh.
A nice collection of startups introspecting their failure.
Wonderful, in-depth Everpix post-mortem.
If you liked this episode, try 24: I AM A TOTAL FRAUD.
Micah Elizabeth Scott (@scanlime) came to talk about Fadecandy, a really neat way to control smart LEDs (NeoPixel, AdaFruit's term for the WS2812). The conversation ranged from beautiful LED control algorithms and open source embedded projects to triangle tessellations, art, and identity.
AdaFruit has a great intro to Fadecandy.
Fadecandy is open source hardware and software, see the repository.
Micah's blog is a combo of art and technology.
Burning Man's Ardent Mobile Cloud (also a lovely still pic).
Elecia also mentioned Deep Darc's hack of the GE Color Effects lights.
Evil Mad Scientist's Lenore Edman (@EMSL) talks about what evil mad scientists do on their path to world domination. Surprisingly, it consists largely of art, education, and soldering.
Some EMSL items we talked about:
We also mentioned Maker Faire, a wonderful community, and Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog.
There is a give away on this show: EMS's Snap-O-Lantern kit. Tweet to Elecia (@logicalelegance) or contact the show. Send in the name of the author of the final quote, first one to do so wins the kit! [Update: Matthew J has won the kit!]
Jen Costillo (@r0b0ts0nf1r3) joined Elecia to talk about Jen's start-up: Bia Sport (@BiaSport). They discuss the difficulties of being in an underfunded start-up as well as the joys of shipping a new product and their upcoming conference talks.
Jen discussed the company's focus on safety and privacy at the DesignCon sponsored Geek Girl Dinner. She will be speaking at :
Elecia will also be speaking at EELive, on how the internet of things isn't serving consumers very well on Thursday, April 03, 2014 at 1pm, though the talk title keeps changing.
Producer Chris White (@stoneymonster) and Elecia discuss some insurmountable problems and some strategies for approaching them.
Dr. Karen Shell and Elecia talk about modelling vs. building models, ocean albedo vs. ice, climate vs. weather, and science vs. policy. They gloat about being on vacation only intermittently.
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
Help run climate models on your home computer at climateprediction.net
Karen's class will be looking at data from NOAA's Climate at a Glance
Elecia gushes about her favorite logic (and protocol) analyzer to Saleae co-founder Mark Garrison. They also discuss start-ups, manufacturing, and covering yourself with rum and pretending to be a pirate when harbor patrol arrives.
Saleae Logic 8 on Amazon (or from Saleae)
Saleae Logic 16 on Amazon (or from Saleae)
Space X reusable rocket video
Saleae's blog talks about Mark and Joe's boat, start here
The mooshimeter multimeter (as seen on Hackaday and Dragon Innovation)
Want to learn how to get from idea to schematic, through layout, all the way to physical boards? Elecia spoke with Chris Gammell about his Contextual Electronics course to teach the missing steps between what an EE learns in college and what an design engineer's job entails.
Chris is co-host of the excellent electronics podcast The Amp Hour and author of Chris Gammell's Analog Life. On twitter, contact Chris via @Chris_Gammell or ask questions about the course @ContextualElec.
We mentioned UT Austin's online embedded systems course which starts soon as well.
Contextual Electronics includes some in-depth KiCad instruction. Some intro (and free) KiCad tutorials:
Elecia describes to Christopher (@stoneymonster) how to design and create a firmware update mechanism. Hilarity ensues.
Making Embedded Systems, the book, on O'Reilly (coupon in last 2 minutes of the show) or on Amazon.
Alison Chaiken (Google+) and Elecia discuss what you need to know to get into development for the automotive market.
Check out Alison's she-devel site for a big list of links and resources or go to a Silicon Valley Automotive Open Source Group meetup to say hello. A small subset:
CORRECTION: In the show, Elecia talks about airplane certification levels as though only the size of the plane matters. As listener Burko points out, the certification level also depends on how critical the subsystem is. Those seatback tray tables don't have to be certified to DO178A, but the artificial horizon does.]
Patrick Kane (@PSoC_Nation) is the director of the Cypress University Alliance, working with colleges to provide development kits and information to college (and high school) students.
Happily, Patrick brought Elecia a new dev kit: CY8CKIT-042.
Producer Christopher (@stoneymonster) joins Elecia to look through their mailbag and talk about gift ideas.
Podcasts we like:
Some listener suggestions on where to get small run boards made:
Gift ideas (specifics):
Gift ideas (stores):
James Grenning (@jwgrenning) joined Elecia to talk about how to be a good programmer using Test Driven Development (TDD).
James' excellent book on how to use TDD: Test Driven Development for Embedded Systems
Take a class from Renaissance Software
Manual test is not sustainable blog post, from James' blog
Legacy code challenge from Github
Iterative and Incremental Development article by Craig Larman
Untapped: the beer drinker's twitter
To get the signed copy of James' book, email ([email protected]), tweet (@logicalelegance), or hit the contact link on embedded.fm with your number between 0-99. First one with the correct number wins the book (if no one is correct, the closest number will be selected 12/25/13).
Kathleen Vaeth of MicroGen Systems (@MicroGenSystems) spoke with Elecia (@LogicalElegance) about energy harvesting using MEMS devices.
Some introductory videos:
While we missed it on the show, Kathleen also wanted to mention MicroGen Systems' finite element modeling partners: SoftMEMS and Open Engineering.
Author Laura Lemay (@lemay) spoke with Elecia (@logicalelegance) about writing books, APIs, code, and science fiction.
Laura wrote many of the Teach Yourself ... in 21 Days books: her bibliography on Amazon.
Laura's blog includes short stories.
November is National Novel Writing Month, see the NaNoWriMo site
Edward Tufte wrote the amazing Envisioning Information (among many other beautiful and informative books)
Neal Stephenson wrote Diamond Age
Laura suggests Patrick Ness' The Knife of Never Letting Go
From the MEMS Industry Group Executive Congress:
From the 2013 IEEE Global Humanitarian Technology Conference:
In this in-depth technical discussion, Dr. Ken Lunde helps Elecia understand how to internationalize her (memory constrained) device.
CJVK Information Processing, Ken’s excellent O’Reilly book on internationalization [Note: there is a 40% off print and 50% off ebook coupon in the last few minutes of the show.]
Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP)
Images of the bone ideograph that is different between Chinese and Japanese (U+9AA8) can be found on Wikipedia.
Other sources of information:
Open source type faces
Adobe’s open source projects and Ken’s contribution to those:
You can also reach Ken via lunde "at" adobe.com
Jen Costillo surfaced briefly from her startup-induced blackout to share her wisdom about manufacturing consumer products. They discussed new product development and working from (and making modifications to) Hacker Dojo in Mountain View, CA. Jen and Elecia pined for this (probably not really a two pack) microscope.
Listener Jim Gf posed an interesting question about how to tell if you are a good embedded software engineer. Producer Christopher White joins Elecia to fail to give an answer. While they mention the embedded C test, they devolve into "why would you ask that question?", impostor syndrome, and methods for dealing with it.
(Normally our podcasts are recorded during the day but this one was after a long, fairly grueling day for the co-hosts. You may hear the clink of glass as we drank a nice Pinot Noir from Hahn Winery.)
Jeri Ellsworth joins Elecia to talk about about co-founding Technical Illusions and their virtual and augmented reality product CastAR. Jeri gives an in-depth introduction to virtual reality, augmented reality and motion sickness. They also talk about hardware engineers working with software engineers, the CastAR's Kickstarter, children's toys, and tagging sharks for science.
Jordan Hart from Digital Media Academy joined Elecia to discuss ways to make science, technology, and engineering fun for kids through Minecraft, Arduino robotics, and music.
DMA video: Robotics and Electrical Engineering with Arduino
TED talk: The child-driven education which describes the "method of the grandmother" teaching style.
Georgia Tech online CS Master's degree
Sincere apologies to fans of Gottfried Leibnitz, he had a truly amazing career that went well beyond calculus, read about it on Wikipedia.
Rob Mitchell and Elecia discuss management, what they like about project schedules, and lessons learned on the path from engineer to manager.
Phil King of Weekend Engineering returned to give Elecia advice on how to fabricate a board, both in a professional capacity and for garage projects.
EaglePCB is a commercial package which is also available as a free, noncommercial version for small 2-layer boards. Other open source packages mentioned include Kicad and gEDA. Some board fabricators provide free tools that work only with their fab houses (such asExpressPCB). Digikey's SchemeIt provides a way to get a PDF schematic (and a BOM), but falls down by not providing a way to generate a net list, a critical part of board fabrication.
PCB West is this week at the Santa Clara convention center.
How Printed Circuit Boards are Designed (1960 Edition)
Hildy Licht electronic assembly and manufacturing
Karen Field (@karenfield) and Elecia talk about 2014 DesignWest, the embedded systems conference, and how to submit your idea for a session.
2014 DesignWest is March 31 - April 3, 2014.
Call for abstracts is open, submit your idea!
Speaker benefits include speaker room, speaker party, full conference pass, conversation starting badge for networking, plus resume fodder.
Elecia White and Amy Button discuss Amy's dream of going to Mars, her previous role in training astronauts to handle disasters, and her current work on a magic box of rocks that will keep Orion's air breathable.
Elecia White spoke with Elizabeth Brenner about devices that can be used to help families worry less about grandparents who live alone (and 87-year-old neighbor friends named Dolores).
Life Alert is the big name in senior push-button call systems. Life Call are the "Help, I've fallen and I can't get up" people. (See the commercial!) Life Call and Lileline have accelerometers to detect falls.
Twilio allows programs to send and receive phone calls and text messages using its web service APIs.
If This Then That (ifttt.com) connects channels to allow an event to trigger other events (i.e. "failed to twitter today" -> text family) .
Fibit API for connecting Fitbit data to other applications.
We didn't talk about this but it is a similar idea: Goodnight lamp.
Elecia tries to get a handle on whether Agile works with embedded software. Curtis Cole (@citizencurtis) argues in favor of user stories, scrums, and story points.
Agile software development on Wikipedia
Test Driven Development for Embedded C by James Grenning
"Many forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." Winston Churchill
Andreas Eieland (@AndreasMCUguy) from Atmel joined Elecia to talk about how the AVR processor line came to life, why there is an AVR in Arduino, and the spirit of making things.
OpenCores AVR FPGA implementation
Elecia’s new dev kit is a SAM D20 Xplained Pro
Artist Kristin Anderson of Idle Creativity spoke with Elecia about the technology of working with slumped glass, getting started on Etsy (Elecia mentioned her craft electronic ideas), and moving from Silicon Valley technology to artistic pursuits.
Kristin's Etsy store, blog, and Facebook page
Elecia's intial craft electronics idea and some followup
Great book for getting started: Contemporary Fused Glass
Kristin suggests Marketing Creativity and Handmadeology as blogs to help build a craft business
Etsy is a great resource for learning to use Etsy: forums and video tutorials.
Bullseye Glass, see classes, especially "Set Your Kiln on Fire" [That does sound fun! -El]
Kristin suggests Marketing Creativity and Handmadeology as blogs to help build a craft business
Etsy is a great resource for learning to use Etsy: forums and video tutorials.
Christopher White ( @stoneymonster) emerges from his producer responsibilities to chat with Elecia about starting a podcast: the gadgetry, the software, the distribution, and, the big question, why we do it.
Links from the show:
Libsyn, a dedicated podcast audio hosting service.
SquareSpace, fast and easy website building and hosting.
5x5, Dan Benjamin's (@danbenjamin) phenomenal podcast network.
Starting a podcast, Dan's guide to podcast equipment.
Dr. Edward White spoke with Elecia about how technology has changed medicine. He described gadgets used in surgery (harmonic scalpel!), how hospitals acquire tools, and why engineers should be focused on patient benefit.
Karen Lightman (@khlightman) joins Elecia White to talk about the infinite awesomeness of tiny MEMS devices. Recorded at the (somewhat noisy but lovely and delicious) Blue Brasserie during SEMICON West.
Karen is the Executive Director of the MEMS Industry Group, the nonprofit trade association advancing MEMS across global markets. This the group that wrote the standard definitions that make MEMS easier to use, see the Resources section of their website.
MEMS Executive Congress in Napa, Nov 7-8. Please bring new MEMS devices to the pitch event (Elecia is a judge!).
They mentioned some ignorance of RF MEMS, looks like someone need to read this book.
Energy harvesting kits we discussed were from MicroGen. They have a neat youtube video.
Redux of the Feynman's There's More Room at the Bottom lecture.
Jen Costillo (@r0b0ts0nf1r3) joins Elecia White to discuss the secret parts of C, keywords that only embedded software engineers seem to know about.
They talk about interviewing and why these keywords make good questions for finding folks who use the language to its full potential. On the show they mention a list of embedded interview questions with answers. (Note: Elecia's book has many excellent interview questions and what interviewers look for when they ask them.)
Producer Christopher White sends along a more concise introduction to the often unused register keyword.
Randi Eckstein grilled Elecia White (@logicalelegance) on inertial sensors: when to use accelerometers vs. gyroscopes; gyroscopes vs. rate sensors; how to make an inertial measurement unit; the basics of quaternions and Kalman filters; what products need which sensors (and why).
Other good resources:
Elecia White is on vacation. Please enjoy some music from the Ballistic Cats!
Josh Chan and Tarun Pondicherry, founders of Light Up, join Elecia White to talk about how to teach electronics to elementary and middle school students. The Light Up Kickstarter ends on June 30, 2013, click on that link to buy your kit or to see the video (including the augmented reality smartphone application).
We also talked about going on Kickstarter, being a startup and about HAXLR8R, an accelerator to help hardware startups.
El's version of the traffic model of analog electronic components came from There Are No Electrons: Electronics for Earthlings.
Matt Haines (@BeardedInventor) of Electric Imp joins Elecia White to discuss how to connect cats (and other things) to the Internet.
Buy an Imp on Adafruit but don't forget the adapter (aka April board). Get started with programming in Squirrel and find hardware details in the developer section of Electric Imp.
We also mentioned Lockitron, a commercial product that uses Electric Imp.
Akkana Peck (@akkakk) joins Elecia White to talk about an introduction to Arduino workshop for high school students.
Arduino boards are a fantastic way to encourage people into embedded systems. The boards are cheap, the starter kits are great, there are lots of things you can do with them, and the compiler software is free.
Akkana's site (Shallow Sky) has the workshop outline, going from morning general activities to afternoon specific ones. The really simple circuit for the photo-theremin we had on the show is linked from there (and the latest code is on github). A separate post describes the the cheap motor boards she's been working on, including the specific chips (including the H-bridge).
The summer camp we discussed is GetSET and they eloquently describe themselves as "a program for high school girls of underrepresented ethnic groups to show them that engineering is fun, is creative, improves lives, and is an exciting career option". It is free to the student, funded through the efforts of the Santa Clara Society of Women Engineers (SWE) chapter.
Elecia and Chris (@stoneymonster) discuss why they chose to go into consulting and what they've learned while building Logical Elegance into the company it is.
SCORE is a great resource for small business, even consulting firms. Also check your local small business administration (SBA) chapter.
Elecia's salary to rate conversion can be found as a Google spreadsheet.
Chris suggests Crash plan and Backblaze for backing up your client specific virtual machines (and everything else!).
If you have specific requests, drop us a note via the contact link on embedded.fm.
Elecia White and Phil King of Weekend Engineering talk about things a hardware engineer wants software engineers to know. Drifting a bit from topic to topic, they touch on interviewing, oscilloscopes, ways to light hardware on fire, why they work on projects at home and writing novels.
Some links from the show:
Phil works at Lytro making amazing cameras. Elecia and Phil have worked at Leapfrog and ShotSpotter together. Very different products.
Phil's oscilloscope (the one Elecia borrows) is a Tektronix DPO4034.
At Phil's instigation, Elecia wrote a space opera novel for NaNoWriNo a few years back. (If you contact us, you can have a PDF for free. But really, she wrote it in a month, what do you expect? Buy her real book to get the good stuff.)
Elecia (@logicalelegance) and Jen (@r0b0ts0nf1r3) compare multimeters then install the Saleae Logic to debug a problem. Elecia pines for a nifty oscilloscope.
Some products discussed on the show:
Saleae Logic USB Logic Analyzer (and direct Saleae website)
(Somewhat expensive) Fluke Digital Multimeter
TPI 120 Compact Digital Multimeter (El's desk meter)
BK Manual Ranging Tool Kit Digital Multimeter (El's other meter, not Burger King!)
Radio Shack 22-801 (Jen's home meter)
Featuring Elecia "El" White (@logicalelegance), Jen Costillo (@rebelbot @r0b0ts0nf1r3), and Star Simpson (@starsandrobots).
This show was recorded at DesignWest, the embedded systems conference.
En liten tjänst av I'm With Friends. Finns även på engelska.