Filtra per genere
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).
- 873 - 477: One Thousand New Instructions
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.
Thu, 16 May 2024 - 1h 24min - 872 - 476: Sidetracked by Mining the Moon
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.
Wed, 01 May 2024 - 56min - 871 - 475: Stuffed Animal or Colleague
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:
The Power of a Look-up Table by Nathan Jones
Zephyr Tools To Debug Hardware by Chris Gammell
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.
Fri, 19 Apr 2024 - 1h 09min - 870 - 474: It's All Chaos and Horror
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)
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-embeddedFri, 05 Apr 2024 - 1h 11min - 869 - 473: Math Is Not the Answer
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.
Thu, 21 Mar 2024 - 1h 10min - 868 - 472: Field of Boxes
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!
Thu, 07 Mar 2024 - 1h 02min - 867 - 471: Bicycle Built For Two
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.
Thu, 22 Feb 2024 - 58min - 866 - 470: Upping the Chaos Level
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
Fri, 09 Feb 2024 - 1h 16min - 865 - 469: Saving the World Is Not a Hobby
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.
Sun, 28 Jan 2024 - 1h 04min - 864 - 468: Designed to Kill All Humans
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.
Fri, 12 Jan 2024 - 56min - 863 - 467: Temporary Axolotl
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.
Fri, 29 Dec 2023 - 52min - 862 - 466: Attacked by a Goose on the Way to the Office
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.
Thu, 14 Dec 2023 - 1h 08min - 861 - 465: Dinosaurs, Pirates, Spaceships
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.
Fri, 01 Dec 2023 - 1h 05min - 860 - 464: Please Make This Monster Look Scary
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.
Thu, 16 Nov 2023 - 59min - 859 - 463: Layers of Band-Aids
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
Thu, 02 Nov 2023 - 56min - 858 - 462: Spontaneously High Performing
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.
Thu, 19 Oct 2023 - 1h 15min - 857 - 461: Am I the Cow in This Scenario?
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.
Thu, 05 Oct 2023 - 58min - 856 - 460: I Don’t Care What Your Math Says
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.
Thu, 28 Sep 2023 - 1h 19min - 855 - 459: Ideas Have to Come From Somewhere
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?
Thu, 14 Sep 2023 - 1h 17min - 854 - 458: Fiddling, DIY, and Cursing
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.
Thu, 31 Aug 2023 - 1h 11min - 853 - 457: Rubber Duck Phase Cancellation
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.
Thu, 17 Aug 2023 - 1h 12min - 852 - 456: Left Right Symmetry of a Banana
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.
Thu, 03 Aug 2023 - 1h 08min - 851 - 455: Snaps!
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.
Thu, 20 Jul 2023 - 55min - 850 - 454: Printf Hello
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
Thu, 06 Jul 2023 - 1h 15min - 849 - 453: Too Dumb to Quit
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:
Build HackerBox #0040 and Wield the PIC of Destiny!
He spoke recently at the Embedded Online Conference about Object Oriented Programming (well, really good design practices). He has a related github repository so you can look at the examples for yourself. He also gave a workshop on creating a simple command line interface (another excellent github repo full of examples).
Probably the best place to start is his Embedded for Everyone Wiki where he collects all the bits and pieces you might want to know about getting into embedded systems.
Thu, 22 Jun 2023 - 1h 08min - 848 - 452: Numbers on Computers Are Weird
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
Thu, 15 Jun 2023 - 1h 11min - 847 - 451: From Concept to Launch
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.
Thu, 08 Jun 2023 - 1h 02min - 846 - 450: Swimming Through Nutritious Slurry
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
Thu, 25 May 2023 - 1h 06min - 845 - 449: Soldering the Ukulele
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.
Thu, 11 May 2023 - 1h 01min - 844 - 448: Little Squiggles All Around
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.
Thu, 27 Apr 2023 - 1h 01min - 843 - 447: All Sorts of Weird Problems
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.
Thu, 13 Apr 2023 - 1h 05min - 842 - 446: World's Best PB&J
Chris and Elecia talk about ChatGPT, conferences, online compilers, and Ardupilot.
Compiler Explorer: godbolt.org (and function pointer example)
Jupyter Notebooks with colab: colab.research.google.com/ (and one of Elecia’s origami pattern generator collabs)
Sign up for the Embedded newsletter! Support us on Patreon.
Conferences and happenings:
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
Thu, 30 Mar 2023 - 54min - 841 - 445: I Do Not Like Blinking
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
Thu, 16 Mar 2023 - 1h 11min - 840 - 444: It Is If You Do It Wrong
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.
Fri, 03 Mar 2023 - 57min - 839 - 443: Vexing Machines
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.)
Fri, 17 Feb 2023 - 1h 00min - 838 - 442: I Do Like Musical Robots
Adafruit’s Liz Clark (BlitzCityDIY) spoke with us about MIDI, music, and tutorials.
Liz’s Adafruit Tutorials include
CircuitPython Trombone Champ Controller
Mini LED Matrix Audio Visualizer
CircuitPython MIDI to CV Skull
Liz sometimes hosts the Adafruit Show and Tell which is Wednesdays 7:30pm ET. Speaking of Adafruit videos, we mentioned the Fusion 360 tutorial on Snap Fit Cases.
Liz’s BlitzCityDIY YouTube channel shows her building instruments including her mentioned Melody Maker. She also has many 3D printables and github repositories under github.com/BlitzCityDIY
Christopher notes that there are browser extensions that allow a person to stop auto-playing GIFs.
VCVRack is a Eurorack simulator for synthesizer modules.
Sadly, Mutable Instruments has shut down.
Fri, 03 Feb 2023 - 51min - 837 - 441: Ear Goobers
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.
Fri, 20 Jan 2023 - 1h 20min - 836 - 440: Condemned to Being Perfect
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
Fri, 13 Jan 2023 - 1h 23min - 835 - 439: Ditches and Psychology
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.
Fri, 06 Jan 2023 - 47min - 834 - 438: There Is Nothing That Is True
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.
Thu, 15 Dec 2022 - 56min - 833 - 437: Chirping With the Experts
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
Thu, 08 Dec 2022 - 1h 05min - 832 - 436: 20 GOTO 10
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:
Introduction to Game Design Lessons
DigiPen Basic Game Development Series
Finally, in a shockingly unrelated twist, we talked about the Joel Test for determining the health of a software development organization. No determination was made on how good The Kid finds his current position.
Fri, 02 Dec 2022 - 1h 21min - 831 - 435: Sad Lack of Gnomes
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
How do breakpoints even work? (via Memfault’s Interrupt)
Fri, 25 Nov 2022 - 56min - 830 - 359: You Can Never Have Too Many Socks (Repeat)
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.
Fri, 18 Nov 2022 - 1h 05min - 829 - 434: I Love It, It’s Exhausting
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
Fri, 11 Nov 2022 - 1h 01min - 828 - 433: Getting Mad About Capes
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
Thu, 03 Nov 2022 - 1h 12min - 827 - 432: Robot Bechdel Test
Martha Wells is a science fiction and fantasy author. She spoke with us about her books (including Murderbot Diaries!), writing, and creating fantastical worlds.
Marth (@marthawells1) has won Nebula, Hugo, and Locus Awards for her work. We mostly talked about the Murderbot Diaries and the Books of the Raksura. Oh, and the Star Wars tie-in about Leia, Razor's Edge. And The Witch King is coming out next year, a brand new world. Heck, just look at her full catalog. Martha also has a blog and a website.
As often happens when book dragons get together, we talked about our hoards. Some books and authors that came up:
Red Scholar’s Wake by Aliette de Bodard
The Spare Man by Mary Robinette Kowal
Ancillary Justice trilogy by Ann Leckie
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.
Thu, 27 Oct 2022 - 1h 08min - 826 - 431: Becoming More of a Smurf
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.
Thu, 20 Oct 2022 - 1h 05min - 825 - 430: Broken Toys All Around Me
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!
Thu, 13 Oct 2022 - 1h 19min - 824 - 317: What Do You Mean by Disintegrated? (Repeat)
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.
Thu, 06 Oct 2022 - 1h 10min - 823 - 429: Start With Zero Trust
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).
Thu, 29 Sep 2022 - 1h 00min - 822 - 428: Sprinkling a Little IoT
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).
Thu, 22 Sep 2022 - 1h 06min - 821 - 427: No Fisticuffs or Casting of Spells
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).
Thu, 15 Sep 2022 - 1h 08min - 820 - 426: Equivalently Annoying
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.
Fri, 09 Sep 2022 - 1h 05min - 819 - 425: Burnout Leads to the Dark Side
Keith Hildesheim joined us in an excellent conversation about avoiding burnout at work (and dealing with the aftereffects).
Keith mentioned some useful books and articles:
Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle
Mindset: The New Psychology of Success
Burnout Is About Your Workplace, Not Your People
5 Ways to Boost Your Resilience at Work
How to Make Stress Your Friend
3 Ways to Recharge When You're Burned Out.
Keith also sent over a few charts and checklists which you can see on the website episode notes.
Thu, 01 Sep 2022 - 1h 07min - 818 - 294: Ludicrous Numbers of LEDs (Repeat)
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.
Thu, 25 Aug 2022 - 1h 04min - 817 - 316: Obviously Wasn't Obvious (Repeat)
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.
Thu, 18 Aug 2022 - 50min - 816 - 424: Between Midnight and 6am
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.
Thu, 11 Aug 2022 - 1h 04min - 815 - 423: Speaking of Aardvarks
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
Thu, 04 Aug 2022 - 1h 08min - 814 - 422: It’s Not a Bug, It’s a Feature
Chris and Elecia chat about origami, learning, whether to future proof tools or buy the cheaper option, simulators, and classes.
Elecia is gearing up to teach another Making Embedded Systems course. Sign up if you want to be in the Yellow Seahorses cohort! Sign up early and often. Sign up other people. Ask other people to sign themselves up and even more other people. Well, you get the idea.
Check out Wokwi! While it looks like it is for Arduino from the front page, there is a lot of work going on to support C/C++ APIs such as the one for Raspberry Pi Pico or the Rust one for the ESP32. Please ask a professor what they’d need to use Wokwi in their class!
In episode 158: Programming Is Too Difficult for Humans, we talked about the Ada language and using it on ARM cores. Learn Ada (at AdaCore).
News
Dead spiders are coming soon to a robot near you
Continuous ultrasounds: probably not for swimming
Is CERN opening a portal to hell? Scientists claim not.
Thank you to our sponsor this week!
Thu, 28 Jul 2022 - 55min - 813 - 421: Paint the Iceberg Yellow
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
Thu, 21 Jul 2022 - 1h 16min - 812 - 420: Googly Eyes and Top Hats
Dan White, CEO of Filament Games, spoke to us about educational games, how to make play part of learning, and simulating robots. We also discussed what makes a good (or bad) learning experience, the limits of games as educational tools, and the elements of fun.
Roblox is a game platform and game creation system. Filament Games is developing a robot simulator called Roboco.
Filament has many games out in the wild, check out their portfolio. If this sounds like fun, check out their careers page.
Durf live streams game playing
Thu, 14 Jul 2022 - 1h 05min - 811 - 314: Why Are Wings Needed in Space? (Repeat)
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
Thu, 07 Jul 2022 - 1h 01min - 810 - 419: Fission Chips
Eric Schlaepfer and Windell Oskay are the authors of Open Circuits: The Inner Beauty of Electronic Components. We discussed the inner beauty of a number of electronic components as well as cameras, photography, writing, preparing samples, and terrible title puns.
You can pre-order the physical book and get a digital early release copy at NoStarch.com/Open-Circuits
Windell is co-founder of Evil Mad Scientist Laboratory (@EMSL). He and Eric have collaborated before on several projects:
The Three Fives Kit: A Discrete 555 Timer
Eric is also known for the Monster 6502, a 6502 processor made up of individual transistors. Eric also writes on tubetime.us and is on Twitter as @TubeTimeUS
Sign up for the Embedded newsletter by the end of July and be entered to win one of these lovely prizes:
The Three Fives Kit: A Discrete 555 Timer (two)
A copy of Open Circuits (one)
A lovely reject from the book, this is the base of a neon bulb from GE.
Thu, 30 Jun 2022 - 1h 03min - 809 - 418: Answer Me These Questions Three
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)
Thu, 23 Jun 2022 - 1h 09min - 808 - 417: I Don’t Know How My Brain Works
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.
Thu, 16 Jun 2022 - 47min - 807 - 416: EEs Are From PIC, SWEs Are From Arm
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.
Thu, 09 Jun 2022 - 51min - 806 - 415: Rolling Computers
Lead Solution Architect at Cymotive, Benny Meisels spoke with us about implementing embedded software security in cars. The discussion touches ECUs, IoT vehicles, threat and risk analysis, and how reverse engineering plays a role in security testing.
Benny works at Cymotive (https://www.cymotive.com/). You can find him on LinkedIn benny-meisels or on Twitter @benny_meisels.
Resources for automotive security:
Automotive Security Research Group (ASRG)
Hacking a VW Golf Power Steering ECU - Part 1 – Willem Melshing's Blog
Instrument Cluster (ICM) Simulator: ICSim on github
Program | escar USA conference | Embedded Security in Cars
Car in a box, also on github and Arduino based: A lower cost approximation of the Toyota PASTA:Portable Automotive Testbed with Adaptability
Ghost Peak: Practical Distance Reduction Attacks Against HRP UWB Ranging
Thu, 02 Jun 2022 - 58min - 805 - 414: Puff, the Magically Secure Dragon
Laura Abbott of Oxide Computing spoke with us about a silicon bug in the ROM of the NXP LPC55, affecting the TrustZone.
More information about the two issues are in the Oxide blog:
Another vulnerability in the LPC55S69 ROM
Exploiting Undocumented Hardware Blocks in the LPC55S69
More about LPC55S6x and their LPC55Sxx Secure Boot
Ghidra is a software reverse engineering framework… and it is one of the NSA’s github repositories.
Laura will also be speaking about this at Hardwear.io in early June 2022 in Santa Clara.
Twitter handles: @hardwear_io, @oxidecomputer, @openlabbott,
The vulnerability was filed with NIST: NVD - CVE-2021-31532
Thu, 26 May 2022 - 58min - 804 - 413: Puppy-Like Glee
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!
Thu, 19 May 2022 - 1h 08min - 803 - 412: Inductors Don't Have Feelings
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):
Thu, 12 May 2022 - 1h 15min - 802 - 411: Batteries Get Upset
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.
Thu, 05 May 2022 - 1h 07min - 801 - 305: Humans Have a Terrible Spec Sheet (Repeat)
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.
Thu, 28 Apr 2022 - 1h 04min - 800 - 410: Emacs From the Future
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!
Thu, 21 Apr 2022 - 51min - 799 - 409: A Better World
Dr. Shirley Davis spoke with us about her book: Diversity, Equity & Inclusion For Dummies.
Dr. Davis is a speaker and consultant on diversity, equity, and inclusion topics; her website is drshirleydavis.com.
Dr. Davis’ books include:
Diversity, Equity & Inclusion For Dummies
Living Beyond “What If?”: Release the Limits and Realize Your Dreams
The Seat: How to Get Invited to the Table When You're Over-Performing but Undervalued
Reinvent Yourself: Strategies for Achieving Success in Every Area of Your Life
Thu, 14 Apr 2022 - 59min - 798 - 295: In the Key of Lime (Repeat)
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.
Thu, 07 Apr 2022 - 1h 11min - 797 - 408: Room In Your Heart for Your Robot
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.
Thu, 31 Mar 2022 - 1h 09min - 796 - 407: Boards Are Like Sandwiches
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!
Thu, 24 Mar 2022 - 1h 01min - 795 - 406: R2D2 Is a Trash Can
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.
Thu, 17 Mar 2022 - 59min - 794 - 405: Bacta Tank for Your Brain
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
Fri, 11 Mar 2022 - 51min - 793 - 404: Uppercase A, Lowercase R M
Reinhard Keil joined us to talk about creating the Keil compiler, the 8051 processor, Arm’s CMSIS, and the new cloud-based Keil Studio IDE.
MDK-Community is a new free-for-non-commercial use, not-code-size restricted version of the Keil compiler (+ everything else).
CMSIS is a set of open source components for use with Arm processors. The signal processing and neural net components are optimized for speedy use. The SVD and DAP components are used by tool vendors so there may be components you care about more than others.
Keil Studio is Arm’s new cloud-based IDE with a debugger that connects to boards on your desk: keil.arm.com. Reinhard talks more about the advantages of cloud-based development in this white paper.
Arm Virtual Hardware has multiple integrations, the official product page is www.arm.com/virtual-hardware. The MDK integration and nifty examples are described in the press release.
Reinhard mentioned the Ethos-U65 processor for neural networks.
The Dragon Book about compilers
Fri, 04 Mar 2022 - 1h 02min - 792 - 403: Engineers Are a Difficult People
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.
Fri, 25 Feb 2022 - 1h 13min - 791 - 402: We Are a Lazy Species
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.
Fri, 18 Feb 2022 - 1h 27min - 790 - 278: Bricks’ Batteries Last Forever (Repeat)
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.
Fri, 11 Feb 2022 - 1h 06min - 789 - 401: Oil and Water
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
Fri, 04 Feb 2022 - 1h 09min - 788 - 400: A Really Long Time
Christopher and Elecia celebrate their 400th episode by discussing what has (and hasn’t) changed in embedded systems over the last 9 years
Fri, 28 Jan 2022 - 1h 05min - 787 - 399: Hey, What's Going On?
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
Fri, 21 Jan 2022 - 1h 11min - 786 - 398: Clocks Get Into Everything
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.
Fri, 14 Jan 2022 - 1h 10min - 785 - 290: Rule of Thumbs (Repeat)
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:
Improving SW with 5 LW Processes
Learning from the Boeing 737 MAX saga
We also talked about code reviews and some best practices.
The Embedded Artistry newsletter is a good way to keep up with embedded topics. You can subscribe to it at embeddedartistry.com/newsletter
Fri, 07 Jan 2022 - 1h 13min - 784 - 397: Owl
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).
Fri, 31 Dec 2021 - 1h 01min - 783 - 293: Skateboard Tricks (Repeat)
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.
Thu, 23 Dec 2021 - 43min - 782 - 396: Untangle the Mess
Uri Shaked shows us Wokwi, his board and processor simulator. We checked out Arduino code in GDB and then looked at his simulator for the Cortex-M0 Raspberry Pi Pico.
First, you should totally look at Wokwi.com. As Christopher noted, signing up for an account shows you many other things. Then you can go look at the processors written in TypeScript in Uri’s Github repos: github.com/urish. Find Wokwi on Twitter (@WokwiMakes, Uri is @UriShaked). You can also find Wokwi on Facebook.
Uri live-coded development of the Pico’s RP2040, it is on Wokwi’s YouTube channel. You can find out more about the RP2040 or the AVR core in the ATMega family by taking his free courses on Hackaday: hackaday.io/urishaked (Scroll down for courses.)
Uri’s homepage is urish.org. You can find The Salsa Beat Machine there as well as some of his other projects. He has a blog there as well as at Wokwi.
Susie Hansen - La Salsa Nunca Se Acaba
Fri, 17 Dec 2021 - 1h 10min - 781 - 395: I Can No Longer Play Ping Pong
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
Fri, 10 Dec 2021 - 1h 17min - 780 - 394: Being Four-Year-Olds
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
Fri, 03 Dec 2021 - 59min - 779 - 393: Don’t Drive My Baby Off the Table
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.
Fri, 19 Nov 2021 - 58min - 778 - 286: Twenty Cans of Gas (Repeat)
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!)
Fri, 12 Nov 2021 - 1h 00min - 777 - 392: It Was C++ the Whole Time!
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.
Thu, 04 Nov 2021 - 1h 00min - 776 - 391: The Lesser of Two Weevils
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.
Thu, 28 Oct 2021 - 55min - 775 - 390: Irresponsible At the Time
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.
Thu, 21 Oct 2021 - 1h 12min - 774 - 389: Blobs Are Not Stressful
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/
Thu, 14 Oct 2021 - 59min
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