Chris and Elecia talk about their favorite processors, their breakfast preferences, large language model ethics, presents, and Eeyore's birthday. Elecia’s new edition of her book Making Embedded Systems is finished! (Except for a couple months of tech reviews, updating, copyediting, and drawings.) It will be out in March. All of the back issues of Byte Magazine Chris’ radio kit that he mentioned but didn’t name is the QRP Labs QCX+ 5W CW Transceiver. Transcript Nordic Semiconductor empowers wire...
Nov 16, 2023•59 min•Ep 464•Transcript available on Metacast Kevin Lannen is an embedded systems engineer making powered wheelchairs safer. This sounded interesting to us. Kevin works at LUCI Mobility ( luci.com ). Check out their tear jerker introduction video as well as technical description of over-the-air update concerns on smart wheelchairs . We also talked about the app that goes with the system: LUCI View . You can find Kevin on Twitter ( @kevlan ) and LinkedIn . Go Baby Go - The Adaptive Sports Connection Transcript Memfault is making software the...
Nov 02, 2023•56 min•Ep 463•Transcript available on Metacast Marian Petre spoke to us about her research on how to make software developers better at developing software. Marian is an Emeritus Professor of the School of Computing & Communications at the Open University in the United Kingdom . She also has a Wikipedia page . The short version of How Expert Programmers Think About Errors is on the NeverWorkInTheory.org page along with other talks about academic studies on software development topics. The longer version is a keynote from Strange Loop 2022: "...
Oct 19, 2023•1 hr 15 min•Ep 462•Transcript available on Metacast Chris and Elecia discuss the pros and cons of completing one project or starting a dozen. Elecia’s 2nd edition of Making Embedded Systems is coming out in March. (Preview is on O’Reilly’s Learning System .) She’s working on a companion repository that is already filled with links and goodies: github.com/eleciawhite/making-embedded-systems . If you’d like to know more about signal processing, check out DSPGuide.com aka The Scientist and Engineer's Guide to Digital Signal Processing By Steven W. S...
Oct 05, 2023•59 min•Ep 461•Transcript available on Metacast Author, engineer, manager, and professor, Dr. Greg Wilson joined Elecia to talk about teaching, science in computer science, ethics, and policy. The request for curriculum that started the conversation was the Cost of Change , part of NeverWorkInTheory which summarizes scientific literature about software development. Greg is the founder of Software Carpentry , a site that creates curriculum for teaching software concepts (including data and library science). Software Carpentry has great lessons...
Sep 28, 2023•1 hr 20 min•Ep 460•Transcript available on Metacast Professor AnnMarie Thomas spoke with us about playful learning through joy, whimsy, surprise, and meeting new people. We also spoke with AnnMarie about how adults can foster an environment that encourages innovation. See more about that (and the interviews of various engineers and makers) in her book Making Makers: Kids, Tools, and the Future of Innovation You can find AnnMarie on Mastodon: mastodon.social/@AnnMariePT If you want to know more about squishy circuits, check out AnnMarie’s TED talk...
Sep 14, 2023•1 hr 17 min•Ep 459•Transcript available on Metacast Trond Snekvik spoke with us about developing VSCode extensions and Bluetooth meshes. Trond is a Staff Software Engineer at Nordic Semiconductor. Nordic’s Visual Studio Code Extensions include device tree and kconfig support for the Zephyr project as well as tools for nRF Connect. Trond’s github page: github.com/trond-snekvik In 329: At Least 32-Bits, Thank You , Kate Stewart of the Linux Foundation spoke with us about Zephyr in 2020 Transcript Thank you to Christopher for providing a picture of ...
Aug 31, 2023•1 hr 11 min•Ep 458•Transcript available on Metacast 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...
Aug 17, 2023•1 hr 12 min•Ep 457•Transcript available on Metacast Damien George spoke with us about developing with and for MicroPython while Elecia tries not to spill all the secrets about her client. To start at the beginning, you probably want to check out micropython.org . Wait, no, one step back. Before listening to the show, you probably should read the Wikipedia MicroPython entry because we kind of start in the middle in the show. You can find the code on github: github.com/micropython/micropython . The PyBoard can be found on store.micropython.org . It...
Aug 03, 2023•1 hr 9 min•Ep 456•Transcript available on Metacast Natalie Friedman joins us to discuss when, where, how, and why robots should wear clothing. Natalie is a PhD candidate at Cornell Tech. Natalie’s website is natalie-friedman.com and you can find her papers in the research section. She has an Instagram account: @natalie.victoria.f AIForGood shows several robots dressed in home, business and social attire. Roomba cosplaying a mouse ( Instructable ) Pepper is an android-ish robot made by SoftBank. There are many clothing lines devoted to dressing i...
Jul 20, 2023•55 min•Ep 455•Transcript available on Metacast Uri Shaked surprises us with a chat about silicon design when we were expecting to talk about a web-based board simulator. If you want to try your hand at silicon design, check out Tiny Tapeout , a way to possibly get your design on to real silicon. The digital design guide is a great way to start looking at how chips work. If you aren’t quite ready for silicon, Wokwi has a Verilog simulator where you can learn to do the digital design. The Verilog Simon Game on Wokwi is amazing. Wokwi is a web-...
Jul 06, 2023•1 hr 15 min•Ep 454•Transcript available on Metacast Nathan Jones has been talking about building command line interfaces, good design practices in C, creating MCU boards, wielding the PIC of destiny, and going beyond Arduino. As we are too lazy to attend the conferences, we asked him to give us the highlights. Nathan is giving two conference talks at Crowd Supply’s Teardown 2023 June 23-24 in Portland, Oregon: Make Your Own MCU Board Build HackerBox #0040 and Wield the PIC of Destiny! He spoke recently at the Embedded Online Conference about Obje...
Jun 22, 2023•1 hr 9 min•Ep 453•Transcript available on Metacast 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 file...
Jun 15, 2023•1 hr 12 min•Ep 452•Transcript available on Metacast Phillip Johnston of Embedded Artistry , Tyler Hoffman of Memfault , and Elecia White discuss the software tasks that tend to fall through the cracks after the device has all its features but before it is in customers' hands. Noah Pendleton of Memfault was the moderator. You can see the video on the Embedded YouTube channel or directly from memfault (also see their other panels and webinars ). Memfault’s Slack Channel and Interrupt Blog are both excellent resources for embedded information of all...
Jun 08, 2023•1 hr 2 min•Ep 451•Transcript available on Metacast Kari Love joined us to talk about soft robotics, robots in religion, and squishiness. Kari co-authored Soft Robotics: A DIY Introduction to Squishy, Stretchy, and Flexible Robots . Her website is karimakes.com . She was previously on Embedded 189: The Squishiness Factor One of the pneumatic drives that we mentioned was a Hackaday Prize Winner: FlowIO . Another was the Soft Robotics Toolkit . However, Kari recommended Amitabh Shrivastava’s Programmable Air ( Crowd Supply page for Programmable Air...
May 25, 2023•1 hr 6 min•Ep 450•Transcript available on Metacast Chris and Elecia talk about internetting your thing, motivating yourself with cheese, a pile of scrabble letters, an electric ouija board, and a supervillain origin story. Elecia will be on a Memfault Panel on June 1, 2023: From Concept to Launch: What It Takes to Build and Ship a New Device Elecia was on Alpenglow’s Industries Solder Sesh #60 with Carrie Sundra. See the highlights (or the whole thing) on YouTube . Chris has been working on building a baritone ukulele from a StewMac kit . The co...
May 11, 2023•1 hr 1 min•Ep 449•Transcript available on Metacast Carl Bugeja makes actuators out of PCBs, puts them to work flapping origami bird wings (or moving robot rovers), and takes videos of the whole process. Oh, and get this, self-soldering circuits. First, origami: flap actuators video . Your source for the PCB actuators: flexar.io Carl’s YouTube channel is filled with hardware, software, successes, and misses. Check out his tiny foldable rover and the self-soldering circuit . His projects are open source so you can find the information on github.co...
Apr 27, 2023•1 hr 2 min•Ep 448•Transcript available on Metacast We spoke with Chris Gammell about IoT, podcasting, relaxing, and learning. Chris works at Golioth.io . They have a neat blog that talks about reference designs, Zephyr RTOS, and making products. We talked about ESP chips which are made by Espressif . The ESP32 line is RISC-V. Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) Some YouTube channels we discussed: Wendover Productions : explaining stuff CGP Grey , especially the recent one about vexillogy and US state flags Blacktail Studio : Soothing woodwor...
Apr 13, 2023•1 hr 6 min•Ep 447•Transcript available on Metacast 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...
Mar 30, 2023•54 min•Ep 446•Transcript available on Metacast We spoke with Charlyn Gonda about making things glow, dealing with imposter syndrome, and using origami. Charlyn’s website is charlyn.codes , the projects we talked about are documented there. You can find her on Instagram ( @chardane ) and Mastodon ( https://leds.social/@charlyn ). Adafruit came up a lot in this episode. NeoPixel Jewel DotStar High Density 8x8 Grid SAMD21 QT Py and RP2040 QT Py Adafruit IO Jason Koon’s Fibonacci displays are mesmerizing. Check them out on Jason’s website www.ev...
Mar 16, 2023•1 hr 11 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 view...
Mar 03, 2023•58 min•Ep 444•Transcript available on Metacast Chris and Elecia talk about photons, comets, patterns, other flying objects, and cameras. Chris uses PixInsight for processing and has an Ioptron Sky Tracker. Apologies to our southern hemisphere listeners because Polaris is not visible there. There are (of course) other ways to align and even in the northern hemisphere more modern trackers don’t necessarily need Polaris. Star Exterminator : who cares what it does it has an awesome name. Though it does what it says (on photos, no real stars were...
Feb 17, 2023•1 hr•Ep 443•Transcript available on Metacast Adafruit’s Liz Clark (BlitzCityDIY) spoke with us about MIDI, music, and tutorials. Liz’s Adafruit Tutorials include MIDI for Makers CircuitPython Trombone Champ Controller Mini LED Matrix Audio Visualizer CircuitPython MIDI to CV Skull Liz sometimes hosts the Adafruit Show and Tell which is Wednesdays 7:30pm ET. Speaking of Adafruit videos, we mentioned the Fusion 360 tutorial on Snap Fit Cases . Liz’s BlitzCityDIY YouTube channel shows her building instruments including her mentioned Melody Ma...
Feb 03, 2023•52 min•Ep 442•Transcript available on Metacast Chris and Elecia talk with Mark Smith (aka SmittyHalibut and N6MTS) about amateur radio, interconnect standards, and podcasting. Mark is a host of the Ham Radio Workbench podcast. His company is Halibut Electronics ( electronics.halibut.com ). He’s been working on Open Headset Interconnect Standard and Satellite Optimized Amateur Radio (SOAR) . Find Mark as SmittyHalibut on YouTube , github , and Mastodon . Chris talked about getting into WSPR in 197: Smell the Transistor but we first talked abo...
Jan 20, 2023•1 hr 21 min•Ep 441•Transcript available on Metacast Chris and Elecia talk to Jeff Gable and Luca Ingianni of the Agile Embedded podcast, discussing the definition of Agile, agreeing about some things, and disagreeing about others. Agile Embedded can be found in your usual podcast locations or get it from the source: https://agileembeddedpodcast.com/ Jeff’s website is jeffgable.com and Luca’s is luca.engineer Transcript...
Jan 13, 2023•1 hr 23 min•Ep 440•Transcript available on Metacast Chris and Elecia talk about house maintenance, blinking LEDs, paper engineering and more. Cutting Mobius Strips Video: Tadashi Tokieda cuts various combinations of loops and Mobius loops - with surprising results. festi.info/boxes.py generates boxes for laser cutting (or other SVG consuming device). Boxes.py is a python module that lets you programmatically generate the SVGs. ( Github repo ) Amanda Ghassaei’s Sugarcube is a MIDI instrument using this SparkFun button pad . We also talked about th...
Jan 06, 2023•47 min•Ep 439•Transcript available on Metacast We talked with John Taylor about his book, how to handle data, and the open/closed principle of software development. John’s book is Patterns in the Machine . It was mentioned on Embedded Artistry and is part of their Design for Change course. John also has a blog ( PatternsInTheMachine.net ) and a github repo that is a companion to his book, showing the PIM framework. Transcript...
Dec 15, 2022•56 min•Ep 438•Transcript available on Metacast 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 amus...
Dec 08, 2022•1 hr 6 min•Ep 437•Transcript available on Metacast Chris Svec joined us to talk about kids programming and how well the Joel Test has held up. Svec’s son (“The Kid”) developed an interest in programming by playing games. Most of his programming desires are around building games of his own. Any time we talk about kids and programming, Scratch comes up. It really is that neat and is The Kid approved. Some resources to get you started (actually, getting started is easy, you may want a book to do more than the basics): The Everything Kids' Scratch C...
Dec 02, 2022•1 hr 21 min•Ep 436•Transcript available on Metacast 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...
Nov 25, 2022•56 min•Ep 435•Transcript available on Metacast 
