Embedded (Logical Elegance)

Andrei Chichak and Chris Svec join us to talk about our new blog: Embedded.fm/blog (!!).

Andrei was on 114: Wild While Loops, about error handling, as well 99: You Can Say A Boat, about MISRA-C. Andrei has been teaching Embedded Wednesdays, an embedded systems class for the Edmonton New Technology Society. It uses the STM32F401C-Discoveryboard. His course materials are on his site (chichak.ca). 

Chris was on 78: Happy Cows, about empathy driven development. He's also working on a different embedded systems introduction (Embedded Software Engineering 101). His blog ischrissvec.com.

Our new blog will include their coursework, excepts from Elecia's new book on taking apart toys, project notes from Christopher, and various other news.

Chris and Elecia answer listener questions about contracting (and consulting).

Reminders: T-shirts! Hat contest! Digilent contest announced in #197! It all ends around May 18th so get your entries in now!

The original discussion was on episode 4: Are We Not Lawyers?

Elecia's salary to rate conversion can be found as a Google spreadsheet. 

Alan Blackwell spoke with us about the lurking dangers of large language models, the magical nature of artificial intelligence, and the future of interacting with computers. 

Alan is the author of Moral Codes: Designing Alternatives to AI  which you can read in its pre-book form here: https://moralcodes.pubpub.org/

Alan’s day job is as a Professor of Interdisciplinary Design in the Cambridge University department of Computer Science and Technology. See his research interests on his Cambridge University page.

(Also, given as homework in the newsletter, we didn’t directly discuss Jo Walton’s 'A Brief Backward History of Automated Eloquence', a playful history of automated text generation, written from a perspective in the year 2070.)

Transcript

Darma (@Darma_inc) is a nascent start-up focusing on optical sensors in a seat cushion to aid in posture, stress reduction, and meditation. Chris and Elecia speak with CEO Dr. Junhao Hu and Sharif Kassatly about building a company, going through the Haxlr8r's accelerator program, and choosing a crowd funding platform.

Keep up with Darma on their webpage and on their Facebook page.

One of their advisors is NASA's Dr. Joan Vernikos, author of Sitting Kills, Moving Heals. 

Combining a love of engineering with a love of words, Jenny List (@Jenny_Alto) is a contributing editor at Hackaday (@Hackaday).

Jenny’s writing at Hackaday including Debunking the Drone Versus Plane Hysteria and Ooops, Did We Just Close An Airport Over a UFO Sighting?

Previously Jenny worked for Oxford English Press working on computational linguistics software. While there she wrote post about the word “hacker”.

Elecia has been secretly dreaming of being a lexicographer since reading Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries by Kory Stamper.

Bill Winterberg (@BillWinterberg) chatted with Elecia about leaving embedded engineering to become a financial planner then to being a technology adviser to other financial planners. 

Bill's company is FPPad. You can subscribe to his newsletter and watch Bits and Bytes, his video blog (or read it).

Bill and Elecia met at LeapFrog. Bill was instrumental in making the original LeapPad Learning System.

When Elecia mentioned Domini Social Investments, Bill mentioned Vanguard Total Stock Market.

Get a Financial Life: Personal Finance In Your Twenties and Thirties

Financial adviser networks:

• XY Planning Network (by interest)
• Garrett Planning Network (hourly fees only)
• NAPFA (fee only advisers)
• CFP® (by zip code)

Robo-advisor (automated investment management)

Bill says: "It shouldn't be this hard for smart engineers."

Jack Gassett (@gadgetfactory) is the creator of the open source FPGA Papiliodevelopment board. He joins Chris and Elecia to answer the age-old question of how to get started with FPGAs.

Jack's company is Gadget Factory.

Chris got the Papilio Pro and Arcade MegaWing.

Recommended reading:

• Mike Field's book Introducing the Spartan 3E FPGA and VHDL (FREE! With code!)
• Mealy and Tappero's Free Range VHDL (FREE!)
• Sundar Rajan's Essential VHDL : RTL Synthesis Done Right
• Roger Tokheim Digital Electronics: Principles and Applications
• Thomas Floyds Digital Logic Fundamentals (also see the latest edition)

Chris and Elecia will be recording live at Hacker Dojo in Mountain View, CA on Monday, September 8, 2014 at 7 P.M. RSVP!

Windell Oskay (@Oskay) of Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories (@EMSL) told us about co-authoring a book: The Annotated Build-It-Yourself Science Laboratory.

Some great EMSL links:

• A signed copy of Windell's book
• Dis-integrated 555 timer kit
• Candle flicker LEDs
• Food in specimen jars EMSL blog post
• Spherical pen plotter (EggBot Pro!)

The book Chris brought up was Thinking Physics.

Windell is also on Google Plus.

Contest to get Windell's signed book has already ended! 

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

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

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

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

Conferences and happenings:

• Hackaday Prize

• Embedded Online Conference : late April, online

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

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

• SEMICON West: July in San Francisco, CA 

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

Transcript

Phoenix Perry (@phoenixperry) spoke with us about physical games. Phoenix is CTO of DoItKits (@DoItKits).  

More about Phoenix:

• Bot Party

• Her site: PhoenixPerry.com

• She enjoyed Obelisk Gate by NK Jemisin

Physical games are sometimes called Alt Ctrl such as at the Alt Ctrl Game Jam. 

Phoenix co-founded Code Liberation with Catt Small, Nina Freeman, and Jane Friedhoff. “Code Liberation catalyzes the creation of digital games and creative technologies by women, nonbinary, femme, and girl-identifying people to diversify STEAM fields.” There is an 8-part workshop in London in Summer 2017 (more info).

Some other interesting people:

• Lynne Bruning (http://etextilelounge.com/)

• Helen Steer (http://doitkits.com/)

• Perla Maiolino

• Rebecca Febrink

How to Get What You Want wearables site

Yoga Pants

AutoDesk Fusion360

I know you only read the show notes because you wanted this link: Velastat LessEMF has the supplies for ghost hunting!

Ben Krasnow (@BenKrasnow) spoke with us about prototyping, Patreon, and staying current. And a whole bunch of stuff.

January 28th Hats and Hacks Party RSVP

Ben’s YouTube channel is Applied Science. His recent videos have been shot with the high speed Chronos camera (whose creator David Kronstein was on The Amp Hour #325).

Ben has a Patreon page which funds randomness. (Embedded also has a Patreon page, for randomness and mics.)

Ben was previously on the show: 119: Do Your Neighbors Have Any Idea?

For BLE prototyping, Ben mentioned the OSH Chip by Philip Freidin (146: The Loyal Opposition) and using Processing for Android to make quick-n-dirty test applications.

We mentioned the Wazer desktop waterjet.

Chris brought up this video describing impedance with a mechanical model.

One of Ben’s favorite videos that he did was the first one with an electron microscope, way back in 2011: DIY Scanning Electron Microscope - Overview.

Ben gets a lot of his news from Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/

Ben’s Twitter criteria was that they didn’t post updates often too often for his one-a-day check and that they focus on tech:

• @bunniestudios
• @vk2zay
• @elonmusk  (for updates on my car's firmware)
• @LongHairNasaGuy
• @szczys
• @samykamkar
• @PaulStoffregen
• @mikelectricstuf
• @johndmcmaster
• @michaelossmann
• @macegr
• @Chris_Gammell
• @EMSL
• @mightyohm

And some of his favorite YouTube channels (Ben said it was very difficult to distill as there are many great choices):

• mikeselectricstuff
• tesla500
• Matthias Wandel
• NightHawkInLight
• The Signal Path
• Techmoan
• Cody's Lab
• This Old Tony
• Clickspring
• Nick Moore
• Gross Science
• Haas Automation
• Hackaday
• Reactions
• I Build It
• Alex Dainis
• bigclivedotcom

We also mentioned architect Frank Howarth of the urbanTrash channel.

Bob Coggeshall (@BobCoggeshall) runs a boutique assembly house. And he co-wrote sudo. There are sandwich jokes. 

Bob's business is Small Batch Assembly (@SmallBatchA). (There might be a discount on your first order near the end of the show. Maybe.) His pick and place machine is a Mancorp MC400. 

Octopart's Common Parts Library

We mentioned OSHPark a few times, Laen has been on Embedded.fm: 92: Everybody Behave, Please

Boldport makes nonlinear traces (SEAHORSE!!)

Relevant XKCD panel

My Date with Drew

How did we not know about Astromech.net?

Bob's Wifi Nixie driver board (also: how Nixie tubes work)

Debby Meredith (@DebbyMe) stops by to tell us what it is like being a venture partner and interim VP of engineering. Debby is a venture partner at Icon Ventures. Her website is DebbyMeredith.com. She was on a new podcast: Women Who Code Radio.

Computer History Museum's new exhibit is Make Software: Change the World. It opens on January 28, 2017. 

After recording, Debby mentioned a book she likes: Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist.

January 28th Hats and Hacks Party RSVP

Antoine van Gelder spoke to us about making digital musical instruments, USB, and FPGAs. 

Antoine works for Great Scott Gadgets, specifically on the Cynthion USB protocol analysis tool that can be used in conjunction with Python and GSG’s FaceDancer to act as a new USB device. 

While bonding over MurderBot Diaries was a given, Antoine also mentioned NAND2Tetris which Elecia countered with The Elements of Computing Systems: Building a Modern Computer from First Principles, the book that covers the NAND2Tetris material.

Memfault is a leading embedded device observability platform that empowers teams to build better IoT products, faster. Its off-the-shelf solution is specifically designed for bandwidth-constrained devices, offering device performance and product analytics, debugging, and over-the-air capabilities. Trusted by leading brands such as Bose, Lyft, Logitech, Panasonic, and Augury, Memfault improves the reliability of devices across consumer electronics and mission-critical industries such as access control, point of sale, energy, and healthcare. To learn more, visit memfault.com.

Chris Svec (@christophersvec) spoke to us about how hope can improve our software and work environments. 

Chris is the author of Embedded Software Engineering 101 blog and has been on the show several times since his first appearance in 78: Happy Cows.

He mentioned Seth Godin’s Three Wishes post. We talked attentional focus and passing basketballs.

Details for the Embedded Cats and Hacks party are in the show. If you can’t attend, well, maybe you can still get a mug (zazzle). If you can attend, iRobot has graciously given us a couple Root robots that we’ll be giving away.

Chris (@stoneymonster) and Elecia (@logicalelegance) talk about design patterns, conferences, and Molotov cocktails.

Wrapper /  Decorator  / Facade

Observer aka subscriber/publisher (caveat)

Delegation and Dependency Injection

Model View Controller (very important if somewhat dated UI pattern)

PyFlakes is a static Python checker

KiCAD Conference is in Chicago on April 26-27, 2019

BangBangConWest 2019 is over but the videos will be up soon including the one Elecia noted about liking things (which was done by Lynn Cyrin).

Embedded.fm Patreon

John Saunders (@NYCCNC) spoke with us about building a Johnny Five robot on his NYC CNC YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/user/saunixcomp). 

You can find all of the Johnny Five build videos on a playlist or check out the NYC CNC page. As mentioned, Input Inc did a lot of the preliminary work.

John recommends books:

• How to Win Friends and Influence People

• The E-Myth Revisited

John is also the founder of Saunders Machine Works (they have a contact page).

How Johnny Five got his name

We were joined in the studio by the Evil Mad Scientists Lenore Edman (@1lenore) and Windell Oskay (@oskay).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We spoke with Axel Poschmannof DarkMatter LLC(@GuardedbyGenius) about embedded security.

For a great in-depth introduction, Axel suggested Christof Paar’s Introduction to Cryptography class, available on YouTube. We also talked about ENISA’s Hardware Threat Landscape and Good Practices Guide.

Axel will be speaking at Hardwear.io, a security conference for the hardware and security community. The conference consists of training (11th - 12th Sept 2018) and conference (13th - 14th Sept 2018). It is in The Hague, Netherlands.

DarkMatter is hiring. 

Elecia has some discount coupons for the Particle.io Spectra conference.

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. 

Transcript

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.

Toni Klopfenstein (@ToniCorinne) joined us to talk about what it is like working at SparkFun(@SparkFun) and why open source hardware is important.

Open Source Hardware Association (OSHWA.org) has a certification program for open source hardware projects and products.

Some of the SparkFun products and posts we talked about:

• Tinker Kit
• SparkPunk Sound Kit
• FLiR Dev Kit with its hookup guide and neat video
• Digital handpan (electronic drum) blog post
• Inflatable Friends (balloon robot) blog post

Open Source Hardware Summit was in Portland, OR in October.

Hackaday Superconference was in Pasadena, CA in November. Their site has the 2015 videos available. (There was an Embedded.fm show about it too!)

Elecia went to Hackaday's SuperCon, got to announce the Hackaday Prize 2015 winners, then talked to the organizers about their conference.

The guests this week were (in order of appearance):

• Amber Cunningham
• Dan Hienzsch (115: Datasheeps)
• Adam Fabio
• Brian Benchoff
• Aleksandar Bradic
• Sophi Kravitz (77: Goldfish, Fetch My Slippers! and 91: Save Us from Astronauts)
• Mike Szczys (69: Look at this Entire Aisle of Standoffs)

Tamagotchi Hive

Adam promised us a list of contributors to the goodie bag. Here it is!

• NFCRing.com
• OSHpark 
• Wicked Device
• Seeed Studio
• Pololu
• Parallax
• No Starch Press
• Microchip
• Nanomagnetics (http://nanodots.com/gyro.html)
• The Hackaday Store

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

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

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

We talked about some Embedded episodes as well:

• #282 with Laughlin Barker about OpenROV

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

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

Darryl Yong (@dyong) is a mathematics professor at Harvey Mudd College (and former classmate of ours, also at HMC). He is working with HMC’s Clinic Program, putting real industry projects in front of teams of college students. He’s also teaching number theory to prison inmates and helping teachers in the chronically underfunded Los Angeles Unified School District.

Darryl writes about his career in education at Adventures in Teaching (profteacher.com). You can read about his experiences with the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program.

If you dig into the archives a bit (2009) you can read about teaching at a high school, for example adapting teaching to different students. What he took away led him to create Math for America Los Angeles, a non-profit organization dedicated to increasing the number of secondary school mathematics and computer science teacher leaders in the greater Los Angeles Area.

Darryl’s personal page (darrylyong.com) and his HMC page (math.hmc.edu/~dyong). Also, check out HMC’s Clinic Program page.

Christopher (@stoneymonster) and Elecia (@logicalelegance) babble about their current projects involving ants, guitars, machine learning, and party planning.

A video of Christopher’s ants

Some tweet threads about our tour of Santa Cruz Guitar Company.

1. Arrival (also: very old wood)

2. Wood is awesome

3. Adding science to precision craft

Elecia has been reading  Hands-On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn, Keras, and TensorFlow by Aurélien Géron. While the 2nd edition preview is on O’Reilly’s electronic library (formerly Safari Online), it will be available via Amazon on July 5th. Or pick up the first edition.

Phillip Johnston of Embedded Artistry (290: Rule of Thumbs) is looking for blog posts, exchanging editing and exposure for posts that make sense on the site. Contact him with a topic idea before jumping in. For the Embedded blog, related to the show with Phillip, Elecia wrote a post about learning to give feedback.

Listener Brian asked about a CS degree for going into firmware. We mentioned our show with Dennis Jackson (211: 4 Weeks, 3 Days).

Listener Craig asked about PICs. We suggested taking a look at Jay Carlson’s Amazing $1 Microcontroller. We talked to Jay in 226: Camp AVR vs. Camp Microchip.

Listener Happyday asked about UL testing. We added FCC testing then asked if any of you could help us. Hit the contact link on Embedded.fm.

Embedded has a Patreon. There are new sponsorship levels! Nothing has changed though.

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.

Transcript

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

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.

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

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

Mars rovers wiki

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

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

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

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

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

Roger mentioned some other expressive instruments including:

• Roli Seaboard
• Haken Continuum
• Madrona Labs Soundplane
• Eigenharp

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

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

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

Transcript for this show

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

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

Transcript

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

Elecia’s book: Making Embedded Systems

Embedded Patreon

StewMac (Ukulele kits)

Transcript: embedded.fm/transcripts/347

Chris (@stoneymonster) and Elecia (@logicalelegance) chat with each other about drones, listener emails, conferences, fighting robots, and moonlighting.

Elecia's Solid talk, an Introduction to Inertial Sensors is on youtube.

Washington Post article about Amazon's good drone behavior 

Apple's IOS security guide (Elecia's security checklist)

Photon WiFi Module (Chris' Linker articles part one and part two)

DAB+ FM Digital Radio Development Board

Sad autonomous fighting robot video and lightning fast autonomous sumo bots video

OpenSCAD- CAD tool suggested by a listener

Elecia's conference apology

Light painting pictures (500px)

Morgan Allen (@captain_morgan) spoke with us about Sphero and Node.JS. This is all not-so-secretly a discussion of the BB8 robot.

Correction: Despite Elecia's repeated insistence that these are steppers, she's just wrong. The motors are DC which only makes sense in a consumer product. More details on this in a later episode.

BB8s from Amazon (probably won't arrive until next year)

More info on Elecia's teardown and talk: embedded.fm/hddg 

The BB8 toy is based on Sphero (buy). They have an open SDK and a wonderful education program. Check out the clear SPRK (buy). It also has a teach-your-kids-to-program app that is pretty neat (but doesn't seem to work with BB8 yet).

Morgan has been involved with NodeBots (@nodebotsSF). They use Node.js (wiki) to send Bluetooth serial commands to Spheros. Their issues list is where new meetups are posted.

Johnny-Five is also a popular way to do computer based robotics with an Arduino (or other dev board) as a hardware intermediary.

IPFS: Distributed file system

ESPruino is a Javascript board.

People's Open: Free Wireless Internet and Local Network in Oakland, California. Also in Oakland, check out Sudo Room hackerspace.

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

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

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

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

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

@artbyphysicist on Instagram 

LinkedIn

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

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

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

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

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

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

Transcript

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. 

Dr. Loretta Cheeks (@loretta_cheeks) spoke with us about implicit bias in text, machine learning, getting a PhD, and STEAM outreach via Strong Ties (strongtiesaz.org).

Also see:

• Loretta’s research on identifying implicit bias (The thumbnail image is from her work.)

• Lotetta’s TEDx talk on AI and remembering

• Yoshua Bengio wiki

Thank you to our Embedded Patreon supporters for Loretta’s mic, particularly to our corporate sponsor, InterWorking Labs (iwl.com).

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.

Transcript

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. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Chris and Elecia chat about simulated robots, portents in the sky, the futility of making plans, and grad school. 

A problem with mics led us to delay the show with Shimon Schoken from Nand2Tetris (co-author of Elements of The Elements of Computing Systems: Building a Modern Computer from First Principles). Look for that later in the year.

Elecia is playing with Webots, a robotics physics simulator. Simpler than ROS’s Gazebo, it also can run in an online mode where you can run it on a browser, selecting between many different robots. 

Chris talked about processing his photos of Comet C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan–ATLAS) using PixInsight and Siril.

Then we talked about grad school (including Georgia Tech’s reasonably affordable CS Master’s Degree).

Tony sent in this insect detector: Mothbox. If you want links like this or de facto letters to the editor, please sign up for the Embedded.fm newsletter.

Transcript

Producer Christopher (@stoneymonster) joins Elecia to look through their mailbag and talk about gift ideas.

Podcasts we like:

• The Amp Hour
• 99% Invisible 
• Radiolab
• 5x5 network’s Back to Work
• Accidental tech
• Splendid Table (food)

Some listener suggestions on where to get small run boards made:

• http://www.cadsoftusa.com
• http://www.seeedstudio.com/service/index.php?r=site/pcbService
• http://www.pcbcart.com/
• http://oshpark.com/

Gift ideas (specifics):

• Dropcam and Dropcam Pro
• Nest thermostat and smoke alarm 
• Online automatic backup services: Crashplan and Backblaze
• Books: Thinking Fast and Slow, Quiet, and Kraken
• The BUS Pirate serial bus logger and injector
• Sennheiser HD 280 Pro headphones for noisy offices

Gift ideas (stores):

• Shapeways 3D Printing on demand
• Think Geek
• Find a kit or component for someone: Sparkfun, Adafruit, or Maker Shed

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.

Transcript

Derek Fronek spoke with us about FIRST robotics. His TechHOUNDS (@TechHOUNDS868) team is based in Carmel, Indiana. They won the state competition and placed 5th in the high school FRC championship.

Derek mentioned the roboRIO controller board, TalonSRX speed controller, and the Spark motor controller. Many of these offer deep discounts to FIRST robotics participants.

Check out FirstInspires.org to find a team near you. The game comes out in January but many teams start forming in September.

Derek’s personal website includes his other projects and a way to contact him.

Sparkfun has an autonomous vehicle competition, this is their 10th year.

Elecia wrote a related blog post for Derek, a few notes about media training. 

Music for after you finish the episode

Professor Paul Fishwick joined us to talk about CS and STEM education, excellent analogies, and the crossover of art and technology. 

The Linker post related to this episode managed to be reasonably topical for a change.

Paul's work:

• UT Dallas homepage
• Creative Automata blog and Modeling For Everyone blog
• TEDx talk
• Aesthetic Computing, one of his books on art and CS. Online chapter. 
• Creative Automata course
• Videos 

 Radiolab Color Episode

Forrester System Dynamics

Max is a visual programming language for music and multimedia.

CS Unplugged is a collection of free learning activities that teach Computer Science through engaging games and puzzles that use cards, string, crayons and lots of running around. 

There are many bubblesort dance videos (mindboggling) but this is the one Elecia knew about previously.

The Computer History Museum is awesome. If you are in the area, you should definitely go. 

Conference and contact notes:

• There is a party/hack event in Pasadena May 9th and 10th, email if you want more info (and an invite).
• Elecia will be speaking at SOLID in SF in June, giving an intro to inertial.  She's got a coupon to share if you ask.
• ESC Minneapolis' call for proposals is open but closing soon.
• Elecia will be at ESC Silicon Valley in July, speaking on being a Maker (or not). 

Randi Eckstein grilled Elecia White (@logicalelegance) on inertial sensors: when to use accelerometers vs. gyroscopes; gyroscopes vs. rate sensors; how to make an inertial measurement unit; the basics of quaternions and Kalman filters; what products need which sensors (and why).

Other good resources:

• Sensor Wiki (excellent visualizations)
• Guide to using IMU  (step by step practical information starting with ADC capture)
• Sparkfun inertial sensor buying guide (descriptions on what's available and how to differentiate between them)

Jan Jongboom (@janjongboom) of Mbed (@ArmMbed) joined us to talk about compilers, online hardware simulators, and inference on embedded devices.

Find out more about Mbed on mbed.com. The board simulator is at labs.mbed.com(Mbed OS Simulator). The code for the simulator is on Jan’s Github. Mbed Labs also has the uTensor inference framework for using TensorFlow models on devices.

You can see some of Jan’s talks and his blog on janjongboom.com.

Jan will be running a workshop at SxSW called Changing the World with Open, Long-Range IoT on March 10 in Austin, TX. Additionally, he will be hosting an IoT Deep Dive Workshop on LoRA on March 14 (also in Austin, TX).

For background on LoRA, check out the recent Amp Hour episode with Richard Ginus.

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

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

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

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

Jess has a blog: blog.jessfraz.com

Rust

Same day PCBs?!?  Danielle Applestone (@dapplestone) chatted with Chris and Elecia about desktop CNC milling using @OtherMachine's OtherMill. 

OtherMill links:

• features
• tools and materials (neat!)
• store (kits!)
• instructables (chocolate spaceships!)
• kickstarter page
• miniature mocha pot
• brass, err.. aluminum turbine (also: what Elecia heard)
• stories of people using OtherMill

Synthetos TinyG controller (also see the Make write up about TinyG)

BANT (budget, authority, need, timing): more info

Jack Ganssle shared his wisdom on being a good embedded software engineer (hint: it takes discipline). 

Jack's website is filled with great essays and new videos. He's also written the Art of Designing Embedded Systems and The Embedded Systems Dictionary (with Michael Barr).

We covered a lot of ground, here are some of the highlights:

• Spark language
• Capers Jones on high quality software and associated statistics
• Joel on Software test for good teams
• LDRA unit test tool
• James Grenning's Test Driven Development for Embedded C

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Transcript

Andrew "Bunnie" Huang spoke with us about manufacturing in China, writing books, and crowdfunding.

Bunnie's new book is The Essential Guide to Electronics in Shenzhen. It is available via crowdsupply and the price goes from $30 to $35 when pre-ordering ends on March 17, 2016.

Bunnie's blog is at www.bunniestudios.com, many of his professional projects can be found at www.kosagi.com including more information about the Novena open source laptop.

Hacking the XBox is available for free from No Starch Press.

Jeri Ellsworth (@jeriellsworth) spoke with us about the latest developments at CastAR, hiring engineers, and her favorite engine.

Embedded.fm T-Shirts are available until the end of June on Teespring (more info).

CastAR is making an augmented reality system. They are in Palo Alto, CA, USA and they arehiring.  They work with Playground.

Jeri was last on Embedded.fm episode 23: Go For Everything I Want.

This week, we mix things up a bit. This joint show with the Don't Panic Geocast.  This episode explores what happens when electrical engineering meets geoscience in cold places. We’re joined by guest Dr. Sridhar Anandakrishnan of Penn State to talk about geopebbles, ice, climate, and more!

• Asimov Robot Series
• Anthropornis (giant penguins)
• Ice crystal structure
• Ice streams
• GeoPebble
• Propeller Programming (Book)

Fun Paper Friday: The Boring Company

Chris and Elecia chat about Bayes Rule, aliens, bit-banging, VGA, and unit testing.

Elecia is working on A Narwhal's Guide to Bayes' Rule. 

ACM has a code of software engineering ethics

Toads have trackers (NPR story)

An introduction to bit-banging SPI (Arduino, WS2812)

We talked to James Grenning extensively about testing on 30: Eventually Lightning Strikes (and about his excellent book Test Driven Development for Embedded C). We spoke with James again on 109: Resurrection of Extreme Programming. We also talked about unit testing with Mark Vandervoord on 103: Tentacles of the Kraken.

A neat TED Talk involving octo-copters, still four short of dodecahedracopter.

Neat Z80 based very minimal computer kit

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

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

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

Peter on Github

Transcript

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.

Jen Costillo (@rebelbotjen) joins Elecia White to discuss the secret parts of C, keywords that only embedded software engineers seem to know about.

Jen and Elecia talk about interviewing and why these keywords make good questions for finding folks who use the language to its full potential. On the show they mention a list of embedded interview questions with answers. (Note: Elecia's book has many excellent interview questions and what interviewers look for when they ask them.)

Producer Christopher White sends along a more concise introduction to the often unused register keyword. 

NOTE: This is a repeat episode from before we'd settled on our name. Note that Jen is the co-host of the Unnamed Reverse Engineering Podcast.

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

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

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

Durf live streams game playing

Transcript

Daniel Situnayake (@dansitu) spoke with us about machine learning on microcontrollers.

Dan is the author of TinyML: Machine Learning with TensorFlow Lite on Arduino and Ultra-Low-Power Microcontrollers. You can read the first several chapters at tinymlbook.com. 

TinyML is a part of TensorFlow Lite. See the microcontroller getting started guide.

Dan works for Edge Impulse (@EdgeImpulse) which is making tools for easier machine learning integration at the edge. Their tools are free and they also have a getting started guide.

Dan recently posted on the Edge Impulse blog about training a TinyML model to capture lion roars.

For TinyML meetups and a forum, check out tinyml.org

Lacuna Space: low cost sensors transmitting to space

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).

This week we talked to Addie (@atdiy) and Whisker (@whixr), the Toymakers (@Tymkrs). They make electronics kits, videos, and conference badges.

Toymakers site (tymkrs.com) has a link to their IRC channel, videos, and Tindie store(including those amazing heart simulators, the easy to make Amplify Me, and Protosynth Midi).

Their reddit community is r/Tymkrs. It has a lot more information about the CypherCon 2017 badges. More about CypherCon at cyphercon.com.

Some of their ZombieTech podcast is available on YouTube (along with First Spin and Patch Bay, see the playlists to find grouped series). Note that Rabbithole is the name of their hackspace as well as the video series documenting project creation. Episode 200 has the violin we discussed.

We seem to have talked about a lot of other people on the show, especially shared friends and past Embedded.fm guests (some of whom were on ZombieTech).

• Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories with their online and Sunnyvale store. This is run by Lenore (40: Mwahaha Session) and Wendell (124: Please Don’t Light Yourself On Fire) 
• Joe Grand (58: Use These Powers For Good)
• John Schuch (74: All Of Us Came In Sixth)
• Alvaro Prieto (130: Criminal Training Camp and 200: Oops)

Some fiction for you:

• Black Mirror (Netflix)
• Feed by Mira Grant [Everything by Mira Grant / Seanan McGuire is on my “devour immediately” list! -El]
• MiTel SX Technician’s Handbook 

Matt Godbolt (@mattgodbolt) spoke with us about settling arguments with Compiler Explorer.

Compiler Explorer comes different flavors:

• https://rust.godbolt.org/
• https://d.godbolt.org/
• https://go.godbolt.org/
• https://gcc.godbolt.org/

You can see the beta version by putting a beta on the end:  https://gcc.godbolt.org/beta/

This a fully open source project. You can read the code and/or run your own version:

• https://github.com/mattgodbolt/compiler-explorer
• https://github.com/mattgodbolt/compiler-explorer-image

Matt works at DRW working on low latency software. Note that DRW is hiring for software engineers. You can read about the evolution of Compiler Explorer on their blog.

Matt’s personal blog is xania.org. You might like parts about 6502 Timings. He also has several conference talks on YouTube including x86 Internals for Fun & Profit and Emulating a 6502 in Javascript. Matt was previously at Argonaut Games.

Jason Turner of C++ Weekly and his C++17 Commodore 64

Could a Neuroscientist Understand a Microprocessor? paper (with a nod to Don’t Panic GeoCast’s Fun Paper Friday)

Featuring Elecia "El" White (@logicalelegance), Jen Costillo (@rebelbot @r0b0ts0nf1r3), and Star Simpson (@starsandrobots).

This show was recorded at DesignWest, the embedded systems conference.

• Board and parts vendors: Sparkfun and Adafruit (both have great tutorials)
• Getting started boards Arduino  (and AVRFreaks) and Raspberry Pi
• Light things up with ThingM
• Find components (and datasheets) at Digikey. And Mouser, Future (Octopart). Avoid Alibaba.com.
• Amazon has a wide range of electronics tools at generally ok prices.
• For sharing: Make Magazine (ideas in writing), Github (software) Open Design Engine (hardware)

Robert J. Lang spoke with us about origami, art, math, and lasers.

Robert has many origami books, here is a subset:

• Origami Design Secrets: Mathematical Methods for an Ancient Art (the one we talked about most, has the hummingbird crease pattern)

• Twists, Tilings, and Tessellations: Mathematical Methods for Geometric Origami (his new one, a textbook!)

• Origami in Action: Paper Toys That Fly, Flap, Gobble, and Inflate (not a theory book, just fun folds)

• Origami Sea Life (not mentioned but probably the book Elecia will be getting next)

Robert’s website langorigami.com is full of neat goodies:

• Gallery

• Origami design software including a pointer to the Origamizer by Tomohiro Tachi

• Crease patterns!

Suggested other books:

• Tomoko Fuse's Origami Boxes: Beautiful Paper Gift Boxes

• Origami to Astonish and Amuse by Jeremy Shafer

Origamido has a number of books. Robert uses Origamido paper but it is unobtanium to most people. Unless you are in Maine.

(Note: book links are affiliate links, we get a little kickback if you buy from there.)

We spoke with Laughlin Barker of OpenROV (@OpenROV) about underwater drones, underwater navigation, underwater exploration of the Antarctic, and extraordinarily large (underwater) jellyfish.

Watch this video of a Trident ROV being eaten by a shark… yes, you get to see the inside of a shark.

S.E.E. Initiative: Science Exploration Education from National Geographic

Laughlin left us with a coupon code for the Trident ROV. Please remember to invite us along on your ROV’ing.

James Cameron of One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) tells us about Forth, science fiction, and laptops.

We have some tickets for ARM's mbed Connect conference is Oct 24, 2016 in Santa Clara. Will you be in the area? Want to go? Contact us if you want one of our free tickets! (There are still some tickets remaining.) 

One Laptop Per Child is one.laptop.org. 

Some getting started information on Forth: Mitch Bradley's Forth and Open Firmware Lessons

James has been writing about putting C Forth on a Teensy (more on the Teensy from the creator's site). He also has a post on using Forth to snoop the Milo Champions Band's BLE. 

James is Quozl on most sites that require a unique ID (such as Github:  https://github.com/quozl). This is from a book called Quozl by Alan Dean Foster. The other older-sci-fi reference was to the Pern books by Anne McCaffery, specifically to the White Dragon. 

In this in-depth technical discussion, Dr. Ken Lunde helps Elecia understand how to internationalize her (memory constrained) device.

CJVK Information Processing, Ken’s excellent O’Reilly book on internationalization [Note: there is a 40% off print and 50% off ebook coupon in the last few minutes of the show.]

Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP)

Images of the bone ideograph that is different between Chinese and Japanese (U+9AA8) can be found on Wikipedia.

Other sources of information: 

• Ken’s CJK Type Blog at Adobe
• Unicode specification, surprisingly readable though large 
• An introductory tutorial  Elecia found helpful

Open source type faces

• Source Sans Pro OpenType font family (for UIs)
• Source Code Pro OpenType font family (for programming environments)

Adobe’s open source projects and Ken’s contribution to those:

• Adobe Blank is a special-purpose OpenType font, making webpages wait to load fonts until they have the correct one
• AGL and AGLFN (Adobe Glyph List) maps glyph names to Unicode values
• CMap Resources are used to unidirectionally map character codes
• CSS Orientation Test are lightweight and special-purpose OpenType fonts that map all Unicode code points to glyphs that indicate their orientation based on the writing direction.
• Kenten Generic OpenType Font  provides glyphs suitable for typesetting emphasis marks in Japanese.
• Mapping Resources for PDF are used to derive content from PDF files that include CJK (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) information. 

You can also reach Ken via lunde "at" adobe.com  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Matt Godbolt (@mattgodbolt) spoke with us about settling arguments with Compiler Explorer.

March Micro Madness is here!

Compiler Explorer comes in different flavors:

• https://rust.godbolt.org/

• https://d.godbolt.org/

• https://go.godbolt.org/

• https://gcc.godbolt.org/

You can see the beta version by putting a beta on the end:  https://gcc.godbolt.org/beta/

This a fully open source project. You can read the code and/or run your own version:

• https://github.com/mattgodbolt/compiler-explorer

• https://github.com/mattgodbolt/compiler-explorer-image

Matt works at DRW working on low latency software. Note that DRW is hiring for software engineers. You can read about the evolution of Compiler Explorer on their blog.

Matt’s personal blog is xania.org. You might like parts about 6502 Timings. He also has several conference talks on YouTube including x86 Internals for Fun & Profit and Emulating a 6502 in Javascript. Matt was previously at Argonaut Games.

Jason Turner of C++ Weekly and his C++17 Commodore 64

Could a Neuroscientist Understand a Microprocessor? paper (with a nod to Don’t Panic GeoCast’s Fun Paper Friday)

Pete Staples of Blue Clover Devices (bcdevices.com, @theiotodm) spoke with us about tools for manufacturing hardware. 

Some posts and products from Blue Clover Devices:

• PLT Spec Sheet and ICT System

• How to write PLT Board Test Plans (using YAML)

• PCB Design Tips and More PCB Design Tips

• Flying Probe Testers in a Nutshell

• Zephyr - an OS for IoT

• BC Devices github

Behind the scenes at factories:

• Shenzhen Tena RT3188 HDMI Stick Factory Tour

• Inside a PCB Soldering Factory - in China

Thank you to our Embedded Patreon supporters, particularly to our corporate patron, InterWorking Labs (iwl.com).

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

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

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

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

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

Laser cut mandalas

OSHPark

Small Batch Assembly

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

Santa Cruz Idea Fab Lab

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

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

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

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

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

Laser cut mandalas

OSHPark

Small Batch Assembly

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

Talia's nightlight

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

Shirts are on sale

James Webb Space Telescope Pop-Up Card

Spicy Honey

Github Codespaces lets you try out some code bases 

Some quirks of C

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

Transcript

Dan Saks answers many questions about C++ in embedded systems: where it works, where it doesn't, and a path to getting started. 

Dan Saks is the founder and president of Saks & Associates. He was a columnist for The C/C++ Users Journal, Embedded Systems Design and several other publications. He also served as secretary of the ANSI and ISO C++ standards committee in its early years. 

We touched on some of his articles:

• Poor reasons for rejecting C++
• Preventing dynamic allocation
• Calling constructors with placement new

Andrei suggested Sams Teach Yourself C++ in One Hour a Day, Seventh Edition by Siddhartha Rao as a good primer for experienced C programmers reluctantly learning C++.

NOTE: The contest already ended.

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

Find him on twitter @Sunshine_Jones and instagram at sunshine_jones_

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

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

Sunshine also wrote about building a polysynth.

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

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

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

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

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

Diversity and accessibility are important, some resources:

• FeministInternet.org

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

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

• Critical Play: Radical Game Design by Mary Flanagan

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

• Gone Home (Steam game)

• Her Story (Steam game)

• Bury me, my Love (Mobile game)

• #selfcare (Mobile game)

Phoenix was previously on Embedded 204: Abuse Electricity

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

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

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

Please note that our Patreon model has shifted to monthly instead of per-episode.

What do you do after space debris, hacking dinosaurs, and judging robots? If you are Dr. Lucy Rogers (@DrLucyRogers), you build an organization devoted to promoting the Making industry: Guild of Makers (@GuildOfMakers)

Lucy’s personal site is lucyrogers.com. She wrote the book It’s ONLY Rocket Science: An Introduction in Plain English.

Guild of Maker’s Twitter hack chats are weekly on Tuesdays at 8pm UTC. They use the tag #MakersHour.

Lucy programs in Node-RED, a visual language.

Craig Sullender of ChipSight joined Elecia and Christopher to talk about machine, computer, and embedded vision. 

Craig's  

• $20 Vision System – IoTcam

• Lighting control demos 

• Slides on embedded CV technology

Peep, a camera for your door'd peephole (soon to be on Kickstarter)

Lattice Mach X02

O'Reilly's Practical Computer Vision with SimpleCV

Kat Scott (@kscottz) gave us an introduction to computer vision. She co-authored the O'Reilly Python book Practical Computer Vision with SimpleCV: The Simple Way to Make Technology See. The book's website is SimpleCV.org. Kat also suggested looking at the samples in the OpenCV Github repo. 

To integrate computer vision into a robot or manufacturing system, Kat mentioned ROS (Robot Operating System, ROS.org).

Buzzfeed had an article about SnapChat Filters.

Kat works at Planet. And they are still hiring. 

Patrick Yeon of Planet Labs spoke with us about making satellites.

We discussed a method of using orientation to control drag to control speed. While Patrick wasn't sure what he could say about GPS receivers on satellites, another site describes them as part of the flock.

Sign up to get access to the huge Open California data set.

Planet has many applications and their blog shows off some interesting finds, such as identifying illegal gold mines encroaching on rainforests, quantifying ports with computer vision, counting trees and classifying agriculture crops, fire mapping, and cloud detection.

They are still hiring, apply using the email embeddedfm at planet.com will earn us (err, not you) more free tshirts.

Matt Haines (@BeardedInventor) of Electric Imp joins Elecia White to discuss how to connect cats (and other things) to the Internet.

Buy an Imp on Adafruit but don't forget the adapter (aka April board). Get started with programming in Squirrel and find hardware details in the developer section of Electric Imp.

We also mentioned Lockitron, a commercial product that uses Electric Imp.

Inventor and Youtube-er, Simone Giertz (@SimoneGiertz) tells us about building robots to "help" her daily life.

Simone's YouTube Channel. Some of the videos discussed in the show:

• Chopping Machine VLOG and its TV commercial (Also: the servo motors used)
• Listener Feedback with TENS machine
• Wake up machine 

Simone's blog, with additional robot build details is at simonegiertz.com. 

For relaxation, Simone visits the Hello Denizen YouTube channel and watches hamsters eating gourmet meals. She also mentioned her preferred Reddit feed.

Like robots? Check out the job postings at iRobot. If you like what you see, email Chris Svec. (Yes, the guy who was on 78: Happy Cows.)

Contest for Making Embedded Systems will end Feb 5, 2016.

Philip Koopman (@BetterEmbSW) spoke with us about making better embedded software. His Better Embedded Systems Software blog has lots of great information including links to his growing video library. Two posts noted in the show:

• Recording Peer Reviews Spreadsheet
• Code Review Checklist

His company, Edge Case Research, performs design and code reviews and teaches how to do them. You can find out more about his course and background on his Carnegie Mellon University staff page. That also leads to the pretty amazing Vintage Aero paper airplanes.

Phil’s book is Better Embedded Software, available via koopman.us and (more expensively) Amazon.

Fagan Inspection

Videos of robots being stressed

Also: Embedded.fm Jan 28th Party RSVPs on Eventbrite

WHOOPS! We didn't record Elecia's mic this week and are taking a track direct from Chris' computer mic. Sound quality is not up to our normal standards. Sorry!

Chris (@stoneymonster) hosted the show, asking Elecia (@logicalelegance) what it was like to write her Making Embedded Systems book. (Thanks to Chris Svec for the request!)

Put in your idea to O'Reilly

Write a novel this November with NaNoWriMo

Come hear Chris and Elecia talk about writing software that can kill you at Hacker Dojo in Mountain View on Monday September 8, 2014, 7pm. Sign up!

Also, bonus quotes:

"Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing." - Benjamin Franklin

"Almost anyone can be an author; the business is to collect money and fame from this state of being." - A. A. Milne

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

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

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

• AndroidAPS github (additional docs)

• Reilly Link is the communication method for some insulin pumps

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

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

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

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

Transcript

Jesse Rutherford (@BentTronics) gave us an in-depth look at the 555 timer IC (wiki).

Jesse runs Bent-tronics.com and wrote The Ultimate Beginner's Guide to the 555 Timer (Amazon).

Some great 555 projects:

• 555 Decimal Adding Machine

• 555 found in a drill trigger speed controller as seen on the Ben Heck Show

• 555 found inside a solar charger controller, video by Julian Ilett

Somehow, despite it being in the plan, we didn’t mention the Evil Mad Scientist The Three Fives Kit: A Discrete 555 Timer which builds a 555 Timer out of discrete parts. If only the creator would come on to talk about it and his other cool projects. Note that EMS also has a great description of how the 555 timer works.

The giveaway is Jesse’s book and the components to build the projects in his book.

Aditi Hilbert (@HilbertAditi) spoke with us about MyNewt, an Apache-licensed RTOS and bootloader.

MyNewt’s Apache page is mynewt.apache.org and the github repository is github.com/apache/incubator-mynewt-core. In the README.md, check out the section marked browsing which points to the file system, ble stack, and assorted other source code goodies you may want to read. The secure bootloader code is also in there but as it is also a cross-RTOS effort (with Linux’s Zephyr), you can find the MCUBoot repository at github.com/runtimeco/mcuboot

Aditi works for Runtime.io (@runtime_io), a primary contributor to MyNewt. They work with companies who want to use MyNewt on their products.

We talked about OIC (openconnectivity.org) and using UDP endpoints over BLE. Constrained http is actually called constrained application protocol: CoAP (coap.technology). We also mentioned MQTT, an older standard attempting to solve some of the same problems.

The Apache license is one of the most permissive of open source licenses: choosealicense.com/licenses

Assorted other links discussed in the show:

• Decoding the Heavens by Jo Marchant
• List of HTTP status codes (418 is the best)
• Last year’s tshirts, logo will be the same but the shirts will be slightly different for the tshirt campaign starting April 26, 2017.

Chris and Elecia answered some listener questions about dynamic memory and shared code. Then Elecia gave a presentation about ShotSpotter, the gunshot location system she worked on.

Elecia enjoyed The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America's Enemies by Jason Fagone.

Ben is the editor of HackSpace, a new magazine about making (and hacking). It's produced by Raspberry Pi, but it's technologically agnostic. The first issue is free online.

The ShotSpotter presentation was originally given with Sarah Newman at the 2008 Grace Hopper Celebration of women in computing.

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

Transcript