Embedded – Details, episodes & analysis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

Susie Hansen - La Salsa Nunca Se Acaba

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

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

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

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

XKCD comic referenced: xkcd.com/1319 

Fitbit’s Tower of Terror Bug

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ChipWhisperer on Hackaday

ColinOFlynn.com

Some FPGA resource mentioned:

• Fpga4fun.com

• TinyFpga.com

• MyHdl.org (Python!)

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

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

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

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

Chris and Elecia chat about their current projects and ideas.

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

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

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

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

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