I am Elecia White alongside Christopher White. We’re here to chat about the interests, careers, and lives of engineers, artists, educators and makers. Our diverse guest list includes names you may have heard and engineers working quietly in the trenches. Either way, they are knowledgeable, enthusiastic, and inspiring.
We’d love to share our enthusiasm for science, technology, engineering, art, and math (STEAM).
305: Humans Have a Terrible Spec Sheet (Repeat)
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.
410: Emacs From the Future
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 from Elecia: Command Line Interface and PWM Experiments with Logic Analyzer Phillip Johnston of Embedded Artistry and Tyler Hoffman from Memfault are kicking off a quarterly embedded discussion panel. This month is about building embedded systems at scale using device metrics: Embedded Device Observability Metrics Panel Jonathan Beri from Golioth created instructions on how to use USB from WSL2. Copy-editing game. Transcript. Thank you to Newark for sponsoring this episode of Embedded!
409: A Better World
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 Your Life Transcript
295: In the Key of Lime (Repeat)
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. If you are thinking about contributing (or just want some fun chats), get in touch on the CircuitPython channel of the Adafruit Discord server: adafru.it/discord Many of the language’s design choices favor ease-of-use over ready-for-production. Imagine teaching an intro to programming class without worrying what computers will be used or how to get compilers installed on everyone’s machines before time runs out. One final note: Kattni did a project that gave us the show title: Piano in the Key of Lime. After we finished recording, Chris asked her why she didn’t add a kiwi fruit to her mix… Kattni explained she had limes and they were small. Chris only wanted a different fruit so she could rename it Piano in the Kiwi of Lime. It is always sad when we stop recording too early.
408: Room In Your Heart for Your Robot
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
407: Boards Are Like Sandwiches
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 production and maintenance, discover why so many choose to partner with Newark!
406: R2D2 Is a Trash Can
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.ai, open source voice assistant. Jay was interviewed by Make Magazine (article). He was on the cover of the magazine; the YouTube video where he was informed was heartwarming. Transcript
405: Bacta Tank for Your Brain
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 manufacturing news Elecia was interviewed by TheAnalog.io newsletter which is a weekly email about manufacturing and engineering Embedded.fm has a weekly newsletter about topics related to the engineering focused podcast (and transcript) Chris Lott wrote a Hackaday article about episode 404: Uppercase A, Lowercase R M with Reinhard Keil. Elecia enjoyed Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback by Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen. Serial Wombat peripheral expander for Arduino will be on Kickstarter soon Chris wanted machine readable datasheets, listener Nick responds with Cyanobyte on github. Infineon (previously Cypress) PSoC (wiki) is a chip/FPGA thing. We talked with Patrick Kane about it in episode 32: Woo Woo Woo
404: Uppercase A, Lowercase R M
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 care about more than others. Keil Studio is Arm’s new cloud-based IDE with a debugger that connects to boards on your desk: keil.arm.com. Reinhard talks more about the advantages of cloud-based development in this white paper. Arm Virtual Hardware has multiple integrations, the official product page is www.arm.com/virtual-hardware. The MDK integration and nifty examples are described in the press release. Reinhard mentioned the Ethos-U65 processor for neural networks. The Dragon Book about compilers Transcript
403: Engineers Are a Difficult People
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 Growth: A Breakthrough Process to Reduce Risk and Seize Opportunity by Rita Gunther McGrath and Ian C. Macmillan. He referenced Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant by W. Chan Kim and Renée A. Mauborgne Elecia enjoyed The Visual Mba: Two Years of Business School Packed into One Priceless Book of Pure Awesomeness by Jason Barron Embedded has: A Patreon page where you can support us and get into the Slack community A newsletter that sends you a weekly email about the show and little notes Transcripts that you can use to look things up or follow along if the speakers are unclear If you’d like to help the show grow, please write a review. Or share it with a friend. Or send it to your school’s Dean of Computer Science and/or Engineering and tell them it should be part of the curriculum to see what engineering lives and careers are like. Or send it to your company’s Director of New Hires and say it is important for techy folks to stay current and engaged in embedded systems. Transcript
402: We Are a Lazy Species
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 current focus is developing two new courses: Designing Embedded Software for Change and Abstractions and Interfaces. There are also many great posts on planning and estimation.
278: Bricks’ Batteries Last Forever (Repeat)
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 nanoamp sleep states along with amp-consuming wake states. Matt’s Joulescope is a tool to do just that (Kickstarter goes live Feb 19, 2019!), automatically moving between 9 orders of magnitude of dynamic range and graphing the results on your computer. Matthew’s consulting company is JetPerch. We mentioned Colin O’Flynn’s ChipWhisperer which uses differential power analysis for security attacks. We also talked about Jacob Beningo’s post on protecting your tools. Find Matt on Twitter as @mliberty1. Elecia is giving away a chapter of her O’Reilly book, Making Embedded Systems. It is Chapter 10: Reducing Power Consumption. Hit the contact link if you want a copy.
401: Oil and Water
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 Programming series can be found on his YouTube channel. You can also find Miro on Twitter: @mirosamek
400: A Really Long Time
Christopher and Elecia celebrate their 400th episode by discussing what has (and hasn’t) changed in embedded systems over the last 9 years
399: Hey, What's Going On?
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 Hardware Hacking Handbook: Breaking Embedded Security with Hardware Attacks by Jasper van Woudenberg and Colin O'Flynn Jen is studying voice-overs at VoicetraxSF Jen has been on the show many times in the past. Some of our favorites include 108: Nebarious about security and privacy 82: I Was a Chewbacca Person about movies that influenced their path to engineering 51: There Is No Crying in Strcpy about interviewing 25: Thunderdome for Antennas about RF and manufacturing consumer products 10: Hands Off, Baby about C keywords
398: Clocks Get Into Everything
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 travels about 1 foot in 1 nanosecond (11.8 inches, 30 cm). Admiral Grace Hopper is well known for giving out nanoseconds. The guitar company Tom mentioned working with is Alembic. Find Tom’s writing on Medium and the Tempo Automation blog. He is on Twitter as @tomacorp and was previously on Embedded 379: Monstrous Cable Corporation.
290: Rule of Thumbs (Repeat)
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 embedded topics. You can subscribe to it at embeddedartistry.com/newsletter What are condition variables?
397: Owl
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) Elecia’s Making Embedded Systems course will have a second cohort starting in March 2022. Sign up for the newsletter if you want an announcement (at the bottom of the Embedded.fm Subscribe page).
293: Skateboard Tricks (Repeat)
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 community? Join their Discord chat server or Show and Tell on Wednesdays 7:30pm (ET) followed by Ask an Engineer at 8pm.
396: Untangle the Mess
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
こちらもおすすめ
朝の散歩
朝の散歩をしながら、日々の出来事や考えたことについて語ります。
楽しいラジオ「ドングリFM」
Web編集者、ブロガーとして人気の2人が話すポッドキャスト番組です。最近話題のニュース、日常に役立つ面白ネタなどを話します。主にライター、編集者の方にオススメの内容になっています。 ・お便りは https://goo.gl/p38JVb まで ・リスナーコミュニティ「裏ドングリ」は以下からどうぞ https://community.camp-fire.jp/projects/view/206637 https://donguri.fm/membership/join BGMと最後の締めの曲はフリーBGM・音楽素材「 http://musmus.main.jp 」より。
ミシマ社ラジオ
本をあまり読まない人も、本好きな人も、思わず本を読みたくなる、そんな時間をお送りします。出版社ミシマ社が運営する、本との出会いがちょっとだけ広がるラジオ
@narumi のつぶやき
声低おじさんの独り言 お便り募集中 https://forms.gle/mFNwFusdE6eszbMU6
一日一配
声の日記。自分の声で日記を書く、LISTENならではのポッドキャスト。
近藤淳也のアンノウンラジオ
株式会社はてな創業者であり現在もITの第一線で働く近藤淳也が、京都の宿UNKNOWN KYOTOにやって来る「好きなことを仕事にしている人」を深堀りすることで、世の中の多様な仕事やキャリア、生き方・働き方を「リアルな実例」として紐解いていきます。 . 【ホスト：近藤淳也】 株式会社OND代表取締役社長、株式会社はてな取締役、UNKNOWN KYOTO支配人、NPO法人滋賀一周トレイル代表理事、トレイルランナー。 2001年に「はてなブログ」「はてなブックマーク」などを運営する株式会社はてなを創業、2011年にマザーズにて上場。その後2017年に株式会社ONDを設立し、現在もITの第一線で働く。 株式会社OND: https://ond-inc.com/ . 【UNKNOWN KYOTO】 築100年を超える元遊郭建築を改装し、仕事もできて暮らせる宿に。コワーキングやオフィスを併設することで、宿泊として来られる方と京都を拠点に働く方が交わる場所になっています。 1泊の観光目的の利用だけではなく、中長期滞在される方にも好評いただいています。 web: https://unknown.kyoto/ . こちらから本文を読んだりコメントが書けます！ https://listen.style/p/unknownradio