Professor Shimon Schocken spoke with us about teaching computer science from NAND logic gates to arithmetic units, micro assembly, virtual machines, compilers, operating systems, and the Tetris games. We also talk about good design, good interfaces, and good tests. Shimon’s book is Elements of Computing Systems and the website with the course lecture notes, slides, videos, simulators, and everything you need is nand2tetris.org . Shimon mentioned his work with teaching math, that is www.matific.c...
Mar 06, 2025•1 hr•Ep 496•Transcript available on Metacast Professor Cindy Harnett spoke to us about new and different sensors and actuators, primarily designed for soft robotics and fabricated with relatively low cost materials. Cindy is a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Louisville where she runs the Harnett Lab . The papers we discussed are here . You can find a longer list of Cindy’s papers on Google Scholar . The video of the SESAME actuator is especially interesting. Transcript Nordic Semiconductor has been the...
Feb 21, 2025•1 hr 2 min•Ep 495•Transcript available on Metacast Debra Ansell joined us to talk about finding friends and exchanging neat gifts, accidentally tricking people into making unmanufacutable boards, and happy, blinking lights. Debra is usually known by the moniker GeekMomProjects (also her website is geekmomprojects.com ). She has been writing for Make Magazine . Debra won one of the SuperCon badge add-on awards so her poseable Bendy SAO will be available at SuperCon Europe. Some other things we mentioned: Seeed Studio XIAO board Adafruit QT Py Deb...
Feb 07, 2025•1 hr 16 min•Ep 494•Transcript available on Metacast Elecia and Chris talk with each other about the state of Chris’ mind, what makes an embedded developer stand out, “LEGO block” based design, unit tests, and astronomy. Whew! Elecia was recently on the Changelog podcast, talking about the world of embedded systems . Chris has been working with Micropython (we talked with Damien George about Micropython on episode 456 ). He’s using a Pyboard to start, but is looking to move on to this board from Sparkfun. Wikipedia has a nice reference on what the...
Jan 24, 2025•1 hr 21 min•Ep 493•Transcript available on Metacast Nathan Jones chatted with us about his proposal for a computer architecture book based on a 4-bit computer. Nathan found the 4-bit computer in the Hackaday SuperCon 2022 badge and was amazed by some of the ideas that folks implemented (see SuperCon Badge Hacking Awards Ceremony ). Nathan spoke at Hackaday SuperCon 2023 on the processor architecture , highlighting some of his ideas for a book. If you’d like to try your hand at the badge, find it on Nathan’s Voja4 Tindie page . Nathan also spoke r...
Dec 27, 2024•1 hr 10 min•Ep 492•Transcript available on Metacast Chris and Elecia spoke with Kirk Pearson about running audio-electronic-art workshops, interesting sounds, and their book Make: Electronic Music from Scratch: A Beginner's Guide to Homegrown Audio Gizmos. Find the book and a whole kit of parts on the Dogbotic Merch page . A few clicks from there you can find the Workshop List (don’t forget the coupon in the show audio). We also mentioned The Thing ( a sneaky listening device ), Elliot Williams’ writing on CMOS synthesizers ( a series called Logi...
Dec 13, 2024•1 hr 7 min•Ep 491•Transcript available on Metacast Nikolaus Correll spoke with us about robots, teaching robotics, and writing books about robots. Nikolaus is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Colorado, see his lab website (or his Wikipedia page ). We discussed Nikolaus’ Introduction to Robotics with Webots Specialization Coursera course (or YouTube Playlist ). These go along with his Introduction to Autonomous Robots (which can be compiled from source from github ). Masters of Computer Science online via University of Colorad...
Nov 28, 2024•1 hr 6 min•Ep 490•Transcript available on Metacast Chris and Elecia discuss her origami art show, ponder PRs for solo developers, attempt to explain GDB debugging, and make a to-do list for getting rid of Kanga. Elecia is having an Origami Octopus Garden art show at the Aptos Public Library for the month of November, 2024. The postcard advertisement is below. There are more pictures on her Instagram ( @elecia_white ). The python tessellation generator is here . Memfault’s Interrupt Debugging Firmware with GDB post is a much more considered expla...
Nov 16, 2024•1 hr 2 min•Ep 489•Transcript available on Metacast Adrienne Braganza Tacke spoke with us about her book Looks Good To Me: Constructive Code Reviews . It is about how to make code reviews more useful, effective, and congenial. Adrienne’s book is available now as an ebook at manning.com or a paper copy later in the year ( Amazon link ). Check out the example Team Working Agreemen t from Appendix A. Adrienne’s personal website is adrienne.io . Transcript...
Oct 31, 2024•1 hr 10 min•Ep 488•Transcript available on Metacast 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, ...
Oct 17, 2024•1 hr 5 min•Ep 487•Transcript available on Metacast 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 th...
Oct 03, 2024•55 min•Ep 486•Transcript available on Metacast 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 Unive...
Sep 20, 2024•1 hr 17 min•Ep 485•Transcript available on Metacast Chris and Elecia talk to each other about setting aside memory in a linker file, printing using your debugger, looking around a new code base, pointers as optimization, choosing processors, skill trees and merit badges. Elecia’s Creating Chaos and Hard Faults talk and slides. STM32 Application Note AN4989 microcontroller debug toolbox includes semihosting. Memfault’s Interrupt blog has a good Semihosting post . Elecia and Steph’s Embedded Skills Tree . A far more detailed one pointed out by a li...
Sep 05, 2024•1 hr 2 min•Ep 484•Transcript available on Metacast Rick Altherr spoke with us about high-speed control, complicated systems, and making quantum computers. If you want to know more about building quantum computers, take a listen to Rick’s MacroFab episode: The Nuts and Bolts of Quantum Computing . If you want to make your own quantum circuit simulator, it only takes 27 lines of Python: A Quantum Circuit Simulator in 27 Lines of Python . What about if you actually want to know about quantum computing? Rick suggests Quantum computing for the very c...
Aug 23, 2024•1 hr 1 min•Ep 483•Transcript available on Metacast Professor Colleen Lewis joined us to talk teaching pointers with stuffies, explaining inheritance through tigers, and computer science pedagogy. Check out her YouTube channel to view her videos explaining CS concepts with physical models. These are also collected on her website: Physical Models of Java . If you are an instructor (or thinking about teaching CS), check out Colleen’s CS Teaching Tips . You may also be interested in some other research: John Edwards Study on Syntax exercises in CS1 ...
Aug 08, 2024•1 hr 5 min•Ep 482•Transcript available on Metacast Chris and Elecia talk about their current adventures in conference talks, play dates, and skunks. Elecia’s talks are available on YouTube: Creating Chaos and Hard Faults : An introduction to hard fault handlings, stack overflows, and debugging hard bugs Introduction to Embedded Systems (O'Reilly Expert Webinar) : An introductions to… well, embedded systems These are both advertising for the 2nd edition of Elecia’s book, Making Embedded Systems: Design Patterns for Great Software . You can also f...
Jul 25, 2024•1 hr 2 min•Ep 481•Transcript available on Metacast Jerry Twomey spoke with us about his new O’Reilly book Applied Embedded Electronics which covers embedded topics such as EMI, signal processing, control systems and non-ideal components. Jerry is also the principal engineer at Effective Electrons . His articles are linked from there and you can contact him via the site . Here is a 30-day trial for the O’Reilly Learning System . You can take a look at Jerry’s Applied Embedded Electronics and Elecia’s Making Embedded Systems as well as hundreds of...
Jun 27, 2024•1 hr 1 min•Ep 480•Transcript available on Metacast Carles Cufí spoke with us about Zephyr, Nordic, learning, open source development, and corporate goals. Carles had some great suggestions for learning Zephyr: Memfault Interrupt Practical Zephyr blog series Nordic’s Developer Academy Zephyr’s Discord server Zephyr’s YouTube channel ( @ZephyrProject ), sorted by views Macrobatics term is from Zephyr Devicetree Mysteries, Solved - Marti Bolivar, Nordic Semiconductor There is also the Zephyr website for a full picture. And various Nordic tutorials ...
Jun 13, 2024•1 hr 5 min•Ep 479•Transcript available on Metacast Jan Rychter joined us to talk about building a company, electronic components, and software design. Jan is the founder and engineer at PartsBox.com . If you are interested in the meta-analysis of the data, check out his article on the Top Ten Hobby Parts and the Electronic Component Database , You can find out more about Jan through his website ( jan.rychter.com ), LinkedIn , o r Mastodon . Transcript...
May 30, 2024•55 min•Ep 478•Transcript available on Metacast 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 100...
May 16, 2024•1 hr 24 min•Ep 477•Transcript available on Metacast 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 . Th...
May 01, 2024•56 min•Ep 476•Transcript available on Metacast Chris and Elecia talk about the Embedded Online Conference, their experience learning Zephyr, and some listener questions. Elecia will be presenting on Creating Chaos and Hard Faults at the Embedded Online Conference , Apr 29 - May 3, 2024. Some other talks that look interesting: The Power of a Look-up Table by Nathan Jones Zephyr Tools To Debug Hardware by Chris Gammell Breaking Good: Why Virtual Hardware Prefers Rough Handling by Uri Shaked Beyond Coding: Toward Software Development Expertise ...
Apr 19, 2024•1 hr 10 min•Ep 475•Transcript available on Metacast Logic gates and origami? Professor Inna Zakharevich joined us to talk about Turing complete origami crease patterns. We started talking about Turing completeness which led to a Conway’s Game of Life-like 2D cellular automaton called Rule 110 (Wikipedia) which can be implemented with logic gates (AND, OR, NOT). These logic gates can be implemented as creases in paper (with the direction of the crease indicating 0 or 1). The paper describing the proof is called Flat Origami is Turing Complete ( ar...
Apr 05, 2024•1 hr 12 min•Ep 474•Transcript available on Metacast Philip Koopman joined us to talk about how modulo 255 vs 256 makes a huge difference in checksum error detection, how to get the most out of your checksum or CRC, and why understanding how they work is worth the effort. Philip has recently published Understanding Checksums and Cyclic Redundancy Checks . He’s better known for Better Embedded System Software as well as his two books about safety and autonomous vehicles: The UL 4600 Guidebook: What to Include in an Autonomous Vehicle Safety Case Ho...
Mar 21, 2024•1 hr 10 min•Ep 473•Transcript available on Metacast Making Embedded Systems, 2nd Edition came out today! Chris and Elecia talk about the changes, the writing, but not the eldritch horror. Then we talk about pianos and origami. The electronic version is available now on Amazon , ebooks.com , Google Play and where you get your ebooks. The paper copy will be out in about two weeks, you can preorder now. It is also available on the O’Reilly Learning System, here is a 30-day Trial . See the Embedded.fm Origami and Flex PCBs newsletter , sign up for fu...
Mar 07, 2024•1 hr 2 min•Ep 472•Transcript available on Metacast Where electronics meets music, there is a board called Daisy. Created by ElectroSmith, Andrew Ikenberry, the goal of the board is to teach computers to sing. Andrew joined us to talk about music, audio processing, instruments, product design, and electronic manufacturing. See the Electrosmith website, specifically the Daisy Seed . The electro-smith github repository is extensive (with many Daisy Examples ). Also see their YouTube channel . Electrosmith is offering 5% off until mid-March for folk...
Feb 22, 2024•59 min•Ep 471•Transcript available on Metacast Helen Leigh joined us to talk about putting together conferences (including Teardown 2024), indie hardware producers (including via Crowd Supply), and building communities. Teardown will be June 21-23 in Portland, OR, USA. More information about attending or presenting . Early bird tickets are available for a limited time! Teardown is put on by Crowd Supply , a company that helps hardware companies launch products. Hardware Happy Hour Portland is a regular meetup that Helen organizes. Helen will...
Feb 09, 2024•1 hr 16 min•Ep 470•Transcript available on Metacast Chris and Elecia chat with each other about motor encoder reading methods, conferences coming up, soldering irons, schematic reviews, looking for a new job, and general life. Some conferences coming up in the embedded space: Embedded Online , April 29-May 4, virtual (Elecia will be speaking) Open Hardware Summit in May 3-4, Montreal, Canada Embedded World in April 9-11 in Nuremburg, Germany Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories was purchased by Bantam Tools! Starter soldering irons? It seemed like sma...
Jan 28, 2024•1 hr 4 min•Ep 469•Transcript available on Metacast Anders Nielsen joined us to talk about why the 6502 is the best processor. Anders also sells 65uino kits on his store: imania.dk . For more explanation of what they are, how they work, attaching peripherals, and programming in assembly, look at Anders’ YouTube channel @AndersNielsenAA , read his blog on abnielsen.com , or read about it on its Hackaday.io project page .** We also mentioned Ben Eater’s 6502 Kit , Adrian's Digital Basement - YouTube , and Rodnay Zaks’ Programming the 6502 . ** Ande...
Jan 12, 2024•57 min•Ep 468•Transcript available on Metacast Chris and Elecia talk about cars, fleeting moments of fame, their year, and the sorry state of tools in the embedded space. Chris became internet famous for asking a car dealership’s chatbot (powered by ChatGPT) to generate Python code for fluid dynamics problems . After this, someone else asked the chatbot to sell a car for $1. Pass the Bricks is an organization that takes Lego bricks and turns them into sets for kids who don’t have any. Speaking of re-use, contact the show if you’d like to get...
Dec 29, 2023•53 min•Ep 467•Transcript available on Metacast 
