Chris and Elecia chat about practice, software quality, and empathy for seemingly unmotivated team members. Elecia is teaching another cohort of Making Embedded Systems in the fall, starting late August. There will be reminders between now and then but if you want to sign up, here is the page . The funny and odd music instruction video with the copy-and-paste method of composition. Sign up for the newsletter! Support us on Patreon ! Transcript...
May 19, 2022•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 413
Tom Anderson returned to the show to describe how transistors and passives work. We discuss everything from vacuum tubes to diodes to transistors (PNP and NPN) to resistors and capacitors. We search for synonyms among the confusing terminology of cathodes, plates, emitters, anodes, grids, bases, and collectors. This was a tech heavy episode so little bit of brushing up on terms may be useful before (or after): Boltzmann constant Physical constant Vacuum tube Diode logic Diode Push–pull converter...
May 12, 2022•1 hr 15 min•Ep. 412
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 hav...
May 05, 2022•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 411
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 ....
Apr 28, 2022•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 305
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 f...
Apr 21, 2022•52 min•Ep. 410
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...
Apr 14, 2022•59 min•Ep. 409
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 ....
Apr 07, 2022•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 295
Machine learning engineer and science fiction author S. B. Divya joined us to talk about artificial intelligence, robotics, and humanity. Divya’s first full-length book is Machinehood which has been nominated for a Nebula (as was her novella Runtime ). You can find more about Divya on her website ( sbdivya.com ) or on her Wikipedia page . Divya also co-hosted EscapePod , a podcast of science fiction stories. Transcript...
Mar 31, 2022•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 408
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 prod...
Mar 24, 2022•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 407
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.a...
Mar 17, 2022•1 hr•Ep. 406
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 manufac...
Mar 11, 2022•52 min•Ep. 405
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 ca...
Mar 04, 2022•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 404
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 Gro...
Feb 25, 2022•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 403
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 ...
Feb 18, 2022•1 hr 28 min•Ep. 402
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 nanoa...
Feb 11, 2022•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 278
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 Progra...
Feb 04, 2022•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 401
Christopher and Elecia celebrate their 400th episode by discussing what has (and hasn’t) changed in embedded systems over the last 9 years
Jan 28, 2022•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 400
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 Hardwa...
Jan 21, 2022•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 399
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 tr...
Jan 14, 2022•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 398
We spoke with Phillip Johnston ( @mbeddedartistry ) of Embedded Artistry about consulting, writing, and learning. In the Embedded Artistry welcome page , there is a list of Phillip’s favorite articles as well as his most popular articles. Some of Phillip’s favorites include: Embedded Rules of Thumb Improving SW with 5 LW Processes Learning from the Boeing 737 MAX saga We also talked about code reviews and some best practices . The Embedded Artistry newsletter is a good way to keep up with embedd...
Jan 07, 2022•1 hr 14 min•Ep. 290
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) Eleci...
Dec 31, 2021•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 397
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 commu...
Dec 23, 2021•44 min•Ep. 293
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-c...
Dec 17, 2021•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 396
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 . C...
Dec 10, 2021•1 hr 18 min•Ep. 395
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 movem...
Dec 03, 2021•59 min•Ep. 394
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 ac...
Nov 19, 2021•58 min•Ep. 393
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!)...
Nov 12, 2021•1 hr•Ep. 286
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 ....
Nov 04, 2021•1 hr•Ep. 392
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...
Oct 28, 2021•56 min•Ep. 391
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 exc...
Oct 21, 2021•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 390
