Ben Krasnow of the Applied Science YouTube channel talks with us about scanning electron microscopes, generating liquid nitrogen, and cookies. Hackaday Conference is Nov 14-15, 2015 in SF, CA! Call for proposals . (Ben and Elecia are Hackaday Prize Judges .) Contact Ben through twitter: @BenKrasnow Applied Science YouTube channel (and don't forget the associated Patreon ). Some specific videos we talked about: Cookie machine Electron microscope scanning vinyl record Faraday effect (control light...
Sep 24, 2015•1 hr 17 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 ope...
Sep 16, 2015•57 min•Transcript available on Metacast Chris and Elecia discuss listener emails and other assorted topics. Preprocessor fun BLE 4.2 writeup from EETimes and the FAQ from Bluetooth.org Drones should follow existing aviation keep out standards (Nick links us to some wiki pages) Automatic dependent surveillance NOTAM Federal Aviation Regulations: Temporary flight restrictions NYT Amazon culture article Cake under a microscope...
Sep 09, 2015•58 min•Transcript available on Metacast Glenn Scott ( @GlennCScott ) spoke with us about API design and techniques for writing good software. Glenn glossed over his bio but it is quite impressive. You can reach him via his PARC page . PARC's Content Centric Networking home: ccnx.org which we talked about in 75: End Up in a Puppy Fight . Literate Programming by Knuth And the more recommended Bob Martin's books While latest source code requires licensing, the binary version of CCN includes the LongBow tools (in user/local/parc/bin). Des...
Sep 02, 2015•1 hr 22 min•Transcript available on Metacast Daniel Hienzsch ( @ rheingoldheavy ) spoke with us about reverse engineering a board, bypass capacitors, and serial protocols. Rheingold Heavy is Dan's company for educational boards. The one he started with was the I2C and SPI education board (its fulfilled kickstarter page ). He brought us the the Graphic Equalizer Kit and Bubble Display Experimentation Pack . Dan's Arduino from Scratch blog series looks at the Arduino hardware in great detail. Contextual Electronics course for learning to bui...
Aug 26, 2015•1 hr 21 min•Transcript available on Metacast Andrei Chichak rejoins us to discuss error handling. Andrei's website says how to reach him or email embedded 'at' chichak.ca Windows 10 "Something Happened" error Hitchbot Book Elecia mentioned: Kindness of Strangers by Mike McIntyre Elecia's book covers logging module in Creating a System Architecture (pp 21-25) Robots and children...
Aug 19, 2015•1 hr 28 min•Transcript available on Metacast Clive Turvey (Clive1), master of the ST Forums, talks with us about ARM cores and answering difficult technical questions for fun. Some answers: NVIC Interrupts on the same pin number STM32F4 PWM channel 3 ST's Cortex-M7 Books (though we talked more about these being good authors, these are the ones Chris and Elecia have or want): The Definitive Guide to ARM Cortex-M3 and Cortex-M4 Processors, 3rd Edition (Joseph Yiu, 2013) The Definitive Guide to ARM Cortex-M0 and Cortex-M0+ Processors, 2nd Edi...
Aug 13, 2015•1 hr 27 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 lightn...
Aug 04, 2015•1 hr 20 min•Transcript available on Metacast Natalie Silvanovich ( @natashenka ) discussed reverse engineering hardware, working on security software, and the fantastic world of Tamagotchis. Natalie's site and blog Hardware Excuse Generator Original CCC 2012 talk: Many Tamagotchis Were Harmed in the Making of this Presentation CCC 2013 talk: Even More Tamagotchis Were Harmed in the Making of this Presentation Natalie's upcoming BlackHat talk: Attacking ECMAScript Engines with Redefinition Flash exploit article for Project Zero: One Perfect...
Jul 29, 2015•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast BeagleBone's Jason Kridner ( @Jadon ) returns to tell us about his new book. Jason co-authored a new book: BeagleBone Cookbook: Software and Hardware Problems and Solutions (or at O'Reilly ). His older book is Bad to the Bone: Crafting Electronics Systems with Beaglebone and BeagleBone Black . Previous Embedded.fm episode 60: Fun Things You Can Make out of Beagles BeagleBoard.org's Google Summer of Code page (including BeagleSat and underwater drones !) Some information about putting Xenomai on ...
Jul 22, 2015•1 hr 25 min•Transcript available on Metacast James Grenning ( @jwgrenning ) returns to discuss TDD, Agile, and web courses. James was on Embedded.fm episode 30: Eventually Lighting Strikes . James' new company is Wingman Software . His excellent book is TDD for Embedded C . James suggested Training From the Back of the Room! as resource to people looking to put together a class. He uses and recommends CyberDojo as a coding instruction tool. Before Agile was Agile-for-business, it was Extreme Programming . James recommends Extreme Programmi...
Jul 15, 2015•57 min•Transcript available on Metacast Jen ( @RebelbotJen ) joined Chris and Elecia to discuss security, privacy, and ethics in wearable computing. Elecia's Linker post is especially relevant this week: Device Security Checklist .. There is already a standard for privacy and security: HIPAA (Title II). While not easy to read, it is a reasonable starting place. Another good (but not quite on-point) resource is the EFF Secure Messaging Scorecard , especially if you consider your device as messaging your user (it's a metaphor, ok?). Als...
Jul 08, 2015•2 hr 30 min•Transcript available on Metacast We talked to Craig Cook about learning embedded systems. He recently attended an embedded edX course through University of Texas . The microcontroller and boards used in the course Craig's next course will be Interactive Python through Coursera As we discussed Craig's alarm clock we mentioned many parts including: FM Module ESP8266 WiFi Module Electric Imp ( Sparkfun or Digikey , don't forget the April breakout board) Chris has also been looking at Particle.io's Photon board for WiFi + cloud dev...
Jul 01, 2015•59 min•Transcript available on Metacast Chris and Elecia talk about satellites, survey results, and entertainment. ESP8266 has an Arduino IDE (thanks, Karl!) Elecia will be speaking at Solid June 25th and ESC July 22nd. To celebrate the first 100 episodes, Elecia made a spreadsheet of all the guests and topics . Chris read and recommended Neal Stephenson's Seveneves . He was ambivalent about the latest incarnation of battlebots ....
Jun 24, 2015•1 hr 2 min•Transcript available on Metacast Manny Wright of Cortus spoke with us about developing processor IP and how it goes from RTL to silicon. Cortus development platform with a Xilinx Spartan and Arduino Due compatibility. Planet Labs satellite contest winners are announced and Elecia has a cold.
Jun 17, 2015•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast Atmel’s Andreas Eieland ( @AndreasMCUguy ) spoke with us about low power chips and benchmarks, including tips for measuring and achieving the lowest power possible. EEMBC has a low power benchmark: ULPBench . EETimes wrote up a great introduction to the benchmark. Atmel’s SAM-L posted some excellent numbers for ULPBench. Chris wanted to look at processors between Cortex-M4 and phone chips. Andreas suggested the SAM7 , SAM E , and Cortex-A5 . Programmable logic blocks (Look Up Tables) Coding tips...
Jun 10, 2015•1 hr 5 min•Transcript available on Metacast Mark VanderVoord ( @mvandervoord ) spoke with us about leading open source projects and test driven development. His site is ThrowTheSwitch.org , a good place to get started with test driven development. Get more info (and a coupon) for his course . Mark's book is Embedded Testing with Unity and CMock . Lengthy list of unit testing frameworks for C Why's Guide to Learning Ruby (free! with entertaining comics!) D Lang...
Jun 03, 2015•1 hr 10 min•Transcript available on Metacast Charles Lohr spoke with us about $5 WiFi (ESP8266), hacking as a hobby, arcade games, and music visualization. Updated 06/02/2015: A listener pointed out that the Arduino IDE can program the ESP8266 , probably an easier setup than Charles' original article. Also, the Linker post for this show is about getting started with BLE . Follow Charles on YouTube (or say hello on Google+ and Hackaday.io ). To get you started, here are Elecia's favorites: High Res Wifi Signal Mapping (ESP8266) ColorChord 2...
May 27, 2015•1 hr 6 min•Transcript available on Metacast Micah Elizabeth Scott ( @scanlime ) spoke with us about Coastermelt, art installations, FadeCandy, teaching electronics to artists, and mental health. Her Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) installation is mesmerizing, some videos . In her Coastermelt project, Micah uses the IDA disassembler . FadeCandy is for sale at Adafruit. Zen Photon is online, demonstrating ray tracing. Micah's website shows her current projects. Micah's previous Embedded.fm episode focused on FadeCandy: 41: Pink U...
May 20, 2015•1 hr 14 min•Transcript available on Metacast Star Simpson ( @starsandrobots ) and Jen Costillo ( @RebelbotJen ) catch up with Elecia and Chris, discussing how hobby projects have changed over the last two years since the show started. Jen's website: RebelBot Star's website and weekly drone newsletter The Buzzer . Star works at Orion (formerly OnBeep). Novena board and Star's project Balboa ODROID Open Cores Crowd supply and What it took to make the Octopart reference card...
May 06, 2015•1 hr 8 min•Transcript available on Metacast Andrei Chichak spoke with us about MISRA-C and ethics. Linker post: It's dangerous to go alone! Take MISRA-C Embedded.fm listener survey (please!) Andrei's has personal website (we failed to talk about his kite aerial photography , it is really neat though) and his company is CBF Systems . Plum Hall C Compiler Validation PC Lint JPL Coding Standards for C (and the mentioned video discussing Mars Code ) ISO 26262 Automobile software standard Cortex-R for high reliability systems ( ARM's descripti...
Apr 29, 2015•1 hr 24 min•Transcript available on Metacast Chris and Elecia talk about memetics , learning, and processors. Elecia was coy about the Pasadena party May 9th and 10th, but Hackaday announced it so you can invite yourself . She will also be speaking at the Solid conference in June in SF (email for a coupon!). She'll also be at ESC-Silicon Valley in July . Star Wars Teaser #2 and SpaceX almost-landing BLE fun: T I's CC2640 and Nordic nRF51822 (Elecia likes the BLE Nano with the free, online mbed compiler for getting started with the nRF5122)...
Apr 22, 2015•1 hr 9 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 lang...
Apr 15, 2015•1 hr 3 min•Transcript available on Metacast Carrie Sundra ( @AlpenglowYarn ) spoke with us about doing a Kickstarter on her own… and nearly failing. The SkeinMinder is an automation tool for small yarn businesses (and enthusiastic amateurs). When the successful Kickstarter nearly fell short, Carrie candidly wrote about it (includes a great description of the economies of scale). Carrie’s yarn company is Alpenglow Yarn . You can use the contact page there to ask for electrical engineering help as well. Carrie is active on Instagram and her...
Apr 08, 2015•1 hr 8 min•Transcript available on Metacast This week we discuss lasers, internet of things, and static electricity. Our extremely opinionated guest has a lot to say, including some scatological humor. The associated Linker post went up early for this one, please check it out. Scary robot litter box...
Apr 01, 2015•19 min•Transcript available on Metacast The linker post for this episode is Be Excellent to Each Other . Dennis Jackson spoke with us about drones (and Airware ), simple code, and learning. Hobbyist drones and UAVs on Amazon: tiny and cheap , medium (Christopher's gift), and please-I'm-drooling-right-now . Only the last one may be an Airware platform (Dennis could neither confirm nor deny). Airware's breakdown of proposed FAA rules Simple code: Cyclomatic complexity Chris Svec's episode on empathy driven design (he'll also be at ESC B...
Mar 25, 2015•2 hr 30 min•Transcript available on Metacast The Linker post for this episode is RTOSs and Brownies . Joel Sherrill ( @JoelSherrill ) spoke with us about real time operating systems, free and open source software, interns, and space. RTEMS home page and wiki Google Summer of Code (the FAQ is the best part!) and ESA Summer of code (awesome tagline: In space no one can hear you code). The LEON is the ESA Sparc core with open source VHDL and extensive use by ESA. Some projects RTEMS is used on include the Magnetosphere Multiscale Mission , th...
Mar 18, 2015•57 min•Transcript available on Metacast The Linker post for this episode: Make Anything James @Laen Neal from OSHPark spoke with us about starting a business, helping open source hardware, and throwing wild parties. OSHPark got its start from DorkbotPDX . If you are in Portland, Oregon, check out their meetup (started out on Mondays, now first Tuesday of the month, look at the CymaSpace meetup calendar for the Maker Meetup). Open Source Hardware Association (OSHA) PCB Design School blog Bay Area Maker Faire 2015 is May 16-17, Bring a ...
Mar 11, 2015•1 hr 8 min•Transcript available on Metacast The Linker post for this episode: How to Win the Hackaday Prize (and Other Design Challenges) Sophi Kravitz, electrical engineer and Hackaday Mythical Creature, came on to leak the new Hackaday Prize details! On twitter, she's @SophiKravitz and often has the reins of @HackadayPrize . Sophi mentioned Matt Berggren's PCB workshop (oh! and a Solid talk too !). All three of us have been trying to make time for Contextual Electronics (now with fewer time constraints!). Hackaday Omnibus HardwareCon (s...
Mar 04, 2015•57 min•Ep 91•Transcript available on Metacast The Linker post for this Episode: Solving a Different Problem ThingM's Tod Kurt ( @todbot ) joined us to talk about the most important part of every embedded system: blinking lights. ThingM has been making I2C lights ( BlinkM , MinM and MaxM ) since 2006. The newer, more productized USB light is the Blink(1) (there is a coupon near the end of the show). Blink(1) had two successful kickstarters ( second one ). The BlinkMs have an ATTiny85 (which is also on the Adafruit Trinket ). The Blink(1)s ha...
Feb 26, 2015•1 hr 8 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
