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).
439: Ditches and Psychology
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 the Mikroe 8800 Retro Click. Elecia is taking Paper Engineering with Kelli Anderson. Chris is taking songwriting courses from School of Song. Transcript
438: There Is Nothing That Is True
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
437: Chirping With the Experts
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 amusing D&D style adventure with an AI. We also talked about ChatGPT. Daniel was previously on the show, Episode 327: A Little Bit of Human Knowledge, shortly after his first book came out: TinyML: Machine Learning with TensorFlow Lite on Arduino and Ultra-Low-Power Microcontrollers Transcript
436: 20 GOTO 10
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 Coding Book: Learn to Code and Create Your Own Cool Games! by Jason Rukman Scratch 3 Programming Playground: Learn to Program by Making Cool Games by Al Sweigart (hey, we know that guy!) griffpatch on YouTube Digipen.edu had two courses The Kid (and Svec) took. Both are free on YouTube: Introduction to Game Design Lessons DigiPen Basic Game Development Series Finally, in a shockingly unrelated twist, we talked about the Joel Test for determining the health of a software development organization. No determination was made on how good The Kid finds his current position. Transcript
435: Sad Lack of Gnomes
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
359: You Can Never Have Too Many Socks (Repeat)
Thea Flowers creates open source and open hardware craft synthesizers that use Circuit Python for customization. She also writes about the internals of the SAMD21. Thea’s synthesizer modules are found at Winterbloom, including Castor & Pollux and the Big Honking Button. It is all open source hardware so you can find code and schematics on Thea’s github site: github.com/theacodes Thea’s site is thea.codes. You can find her blog there with deeply technical and detailed posts such as The most thoroughly commented linker script (probably), The Design of the Roland Juno oscillators, and Understanding the SAMD21 Clocks. She’s on Twitter as Stargirl, @theavalkyrie. For more information about the Eurorack, listen to Embedded 356: Deceive and Manipulate You with Leonardo Laguna Ruiz of Vult.
434: I Love It, It’s Exhausting
Sarah Withee spoke with us about using an artificial pancreas, learning many programming languages, and FIRST robotics. More about the Open Artificial Pancreas System can be found at OpenAPS.org or in their documentation. Some other pieces we talked about include: LoopKit: an automated insulin delivery app template for iOS github (some additional docs) AndroidAPS github (additional docs) Reilly Link is the communication method for some insulin pumps Orange Link is a Reilly Link compatible device to run OpenAPS To get involved with FIRST robotics, the place to start is FIRSTInspires.org Sarah’s website is GeekyGirlSarah.com. Her programming language comparison tool is Code Thesaurus: codethesaur.us/ If you want to see small algorithms written in different languages, check out Rosetta Code Transcript
433: Getting Mad About Capes
Michael Gielda spoke with us about Renode, an open source embedded systems simulator. It also simulates large distributed systems and network communications. Check out Renode.io and the boards supported by Renode and Zephyr on Renodepedia. Elecia played with the Nucleo F401 tutorial on colab. Michael is the co-founder of Antmicro. The ESP32-C3 is a commercial RISC-V core with WiFi and BLE. We also mentioned Wokwi on the show. (And we had its creator Uri Shaked as a guest on episode 396: Untangle the Mess Transcript
432: Robot Bechdel Test
Martha Wells is a science fiction and fantasy author. She spoke with us about her books (including Murderbot Diaries!), writing, and creating fantastical worlds. Marth (@marthawells1) has won Nebula, Hugo, and Locus Awards for her work. We mostly talked about the Murderbot Diaries and the Books of the Raksura. Oh, and the Star Wars tie-in about Leia, Razor's Edge. And The Witch King is coming out next year, a brand new world. Heck, just look at her full catalog. Martha also has a blog and a website. As often happens when book dragons get together, we talked about our hoards. Some books and authors that came up: Red Scholar’s Wake by Aliette de Bodard The Spare Man by Mary Robinette Kowal Ian Halle Ancillary Justice trilogy by Ann Leckie Phyllis Gotlieb (Wikipedia) Andre Norton (Wikipedia) Zenna Henderson (Wikipedia) The Vorkosigan Saga by Lois McMaster Bujold (we didn’t like the new covers as much as the old but the books are great either way) Tor.com is a fantastic site with lots of free fiction. Murderbot started there and has a few short stories that are otherwise hard to find. There is a rare and sold out Subterranean Press edition of the Murderbot Diaries with illustrations from Tommy Arnold. See some of the illustrations. Transcript
431: Becoming More of a Smurf
Jasper van Woudenberg spoke with us about hacking hardware, writing a technical book, and ethics. The Hardware Hacking Handbook was written by Jasper and Colin O’Flynn (ChipWhisperer and episode 286: Twenty Cans of Gas). The site related to the book is hardwarehacking.io, you don’t need the book to play with some of the examples. Jasper (@jzvw) is also the CTO of Riscure North America, a company that specializes in hardware security. They are hiring. Transcript
430: Broken Toys All Around Me
Chris and Elecia bounce from topic to topic, discussing life and work and occasionally answering listener emails. Python can format code into equations in Latex with Latexify (as noted in this tweet) Interesting sensor: Sensing deep-tissue physiology via wearable ultrasonic phased arrays Turing Complete - a listener-recommended logic gate puzzle game for Steam. In the past, we’ve also talked about Zachtronics’ TIS-100 which is similar and Shenzhen IO which is at the circuit level. Oh, and there is The Human Resource Machine by Tomorrow Corporation. A listener recommended the Agile Embedded Podcast, particularly the episode on technical debt. News that Rollercoasters are triggering iPhone 14 and Apple Watch Crash Detection led to a mentions of a blog post about debugging Fitbit’s issues with rollercoasters and accelerometers. Visual Studio Code for embedded systems development: You can use CubeMX and Platform.io (here is a how-to) Try out this stm32-for-vscode extension that claims to do what you want (we haven’t tried it, tell us if it works) Or you can go more directly with the cortex-debug extension and locally installed ARM GCC package. Don’t forget the VSCode Code Spell Checker extension. From the notes for Elecia’s class: Where to buy small quantity prototyping components Having looked for an OLED display part in Live Class, I wanted to put together a list of where you might want to look for components, especially for the prototype stage. Adafruit and Sparkfun (and EMSL and a lot of other maker stores). If you are using their code as template or test code, look for their boards to see if you can use them. Worldwide and large components distributors with local distribution: Digikey is worldwide and they resell Adafruit and Sparkfun so if you don’t want to start with an “OLED” search on Digikey and sort through the results, well, you can start with easier prototype parts. Farnell is a UK company though they have other names in other locations (Newark in the US and Element14 in Asia and Oceania). If they have your flag, you can probably get cheap shipping. Farnell is usually good for all of Europe. RS Components is also new to me though they seem to stock Adafruit parts as well as general electronics. They have lots of distributors all over the world (including more in Africa than I usually see). AliExpress is huge and worldwide, shipping from Asia. It is hard to find things but searching “Adafruit [part]” or “Sparkfun [part]” and you might find what you want… or a cheaper knockoff. Usually you want results in the Electronic Components and Supplies. Note: if it seems too good to be true it probably is. UK has Pimoroni and Cool Components and OkDo resell Adafruit and Sparkfun as well as other pieces like BBC micro:bit and Raspberry Pi. These may work for European countries. Seeed Studio has a wide variety of parts, the Grove and Components categories have parts that might be interesting. They deliver quickly and cheaply to Oceania and Asia. DFRobot is new to me but looks great. It was recommended for folks in Asia and Oceania. Their parts are resold through Digikey, Arrow, Farnell (Newark). Australia: Little Bird Electronics, Core Electronics, and Altronics Transcript
317: What Do You Mean by Disintegrated? (Repeat)
We were joined in the studio by the Evil Mad Scientists Lenore Edman and Windell Oskay. Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories (@EMSL) produces the disintegrated 555 Timer kit and 741 Op-Amp kit. These were made in conjunction with Eric Schlaepfer, who also created the Monster 6502. EMSL also makes the Eggbot kit and AxiDraw not-kit (and mini-kit). For a history of the pen plotter, check out Sher Minn’s Plotter People talk on YouTube. (They have too many neat things to list here, go look on their page: https://shop.evilmadscientist.com/directory. Or stop into their Sunnyvale, California shop.) We talked about the beauty of boards including Kong Money and ElectroCookie’s candy colored shields and Arduino Leonardo. Jepson Herbarium has interesting workshops including one about seaweed. At one workshop, Lenore and Windell got to talk to Josie Iselin, author of The Curious World of Seaweed. Elecia enjoyed Slime: How Algae Created Us, Plague Us, and Just Might Save Us by Ruth Kassinger. Windell was previously on Embedded episode #124: Please Don’t Light Yourself on Fire, we mainly talked about the book he co-authored: The Annotated Build-It-Yourself Science Laboratory. Lenore was previously on Embedded episode #40: Mwahaha Session, we talked about EMSL. Our post-show tidepooling was very successful with a variety of nudibranchs, shrimp, seaweed, sea birds, snails, and hermit crabs.
429: Start With Zero Trust
We spoke with Duncan Haldane about creating hardware schematics by writing software code, three dimensional circuits, and bio-inspired jumping robots. Duncan is the CEO of JitX (jitx.com). They recently received Series A funding and are currently hiring engineers. Please mention that you heard about JitX here on Embedded. While earning a PhD at UC Berkeley, Duncan (@DuncanHaldane) also worked on Salto (video) and OpenRoach (github). Transcript
428: Sprinkling a Little IoT
Jonathan Beri spoke with us about the different IoT development tools and how to categorize them. Jonathan (@beriberikix) is the CEO of Golioth (@golioth_iot). He wrote a blog post called An Introduction to The Five Clouds of IoT, breaking the clouds into individual clouds: device, connectivity, data, application, and development. Jonathan was previously on Embedded 222: Virtual Bunnie when he worked for Particle.io. A partial list of the IoT tools we mentioned: ThingsBoard Freeboard Grafana Ubidots Renode Memfault Golioth Particle.io Node-RED Soracom Hologram.io See also A list of IoT platforms – Systev post mentioned in the show (also Building The Infinite Matrix Of Tamagotchis | Hackaday). Transcript
427: No Fisticuffs or Casting of Spells
Elizabeth Wharton spoke to us about laws, computers, cybersecurity, and funding education in rural communities. She is a strong proponent of privacy by design and de-identification by default. Liz (@LawyerLiz) is the VP of Operations at Scythe.io (@scythe_io), a company that works in cybersecurity. She won the Cybersecurity or Privacy Woman Law Professional of the Year for 2022 at DefCon. Liz is on the advisory board of the Rural Tech Fund (@ruraltechfund) which strives to reduce the digital divide between rural and urban areas. We mentioned disclose.io and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA, wiki). Transcript
426: Equivalently Annoying
Elecia and Chris are back from vacation and catching up! Today’s topics include: last week’s burnout episode and what we learned, what is a PSoC and why would you want one, how to get up to speed as a junior engineer, and a few more side quests. The burnout episode with Keith Hildesheim was last week, we encourage you to check it out, we learned some things about ourselves and maybe you will too. Chris mentioned astrophotography and here’s the link to the reddit post that inspires him to keep going: astrounding Jupiter video. In case you missed it in the newsletter, which you should definitely sign up for, here’s Chris’ list of VSCode extensions: AutoScroll - Have a log file open that you're monitoring? This extension keeps the tab scrolled to the bottom at all times. Doxygen Documentation Generator - Quickly generate and pre-fill those tedious doxygen style comments. GitHub Pull Requests and Issues - Make pull-requests or do reviews for Github right in the editor. GitLens - Easily see revision history and "blame" for every line of code in a pretty unobtrusive way. Header source switch - Ever want to switch really quickly to a C file's header (or vice versa)? This adds a keyboard shortcut to do just that. TODO Highlight - Makes those millions of TODOs and FIXMEs light up in a nice neon color so you can't ignore them anymore. Transcript
425: Burnout Leads to the Dark Side
Keith Hildesheim joined us in an excellent conversation about avoiding burnout at work (and dealing with the aftereffects). Keith mentioned some useful books and articles: Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle Mindset: The New Psychology of Success SCARF Model Burnout Is About Your Workplace, Not Your People 5 Ways to Boost Your Resilience at Work How to Make Stress Your Friend Growth Mindset vs. Fixed Mindfulness Exercises 3 Ways to Recharge When You're Burned Out. Transcript Keith also sent over a few charts and checklists which you can see on the website episode notes.
294: Ludicrous Numbers of LEDs (Repeat)
Mike Harrison challenged us to a PIC fight on twitter. Surprisingly, no blood was shed and we mostly talked about LEDs and art installations. Mike’s YouTube Channel and his website electricstuff.co.uk. He's on twitter as @mikelectricstuf. Here's a link to what prompted the show: PIC fight on Twitter. His professional hire-him-to-work-on-your-neat-stuff site is whitewing.co.uk For driving LEDs, Mike likes the TI TLC5971: 12-Channel, 16-Bit ES-PWM RGB LED Driver with 3.3V Linear Regulator.
316: Obviously Wasn't Obvious (Repeat)
Professor Barbara Liskov spoke with us about the Liskov substitution principle, data abstraction, software crisis, and winning a Turing Award. See Professor Liskov’s page at MIT, including her incredible CV.
424: Between Midnight and 6am
Gustavo Pezzi spoke with us about using fun and simple systems to explain low-level concepts and how they work in higher-level engineering tasks. For example, teaching microprocessor concepts using Atari 2600 assembly and physics by creating a simple game engine. Gustavo’s site is Pikuma.com. He has a free taster course on bit-shifting. We also talked about Atari 2600 Programming with 6502 Assembly and Physics Game Engine Programming. Stella, a multi-platform Atari 2600 emulator For examples of optimizing in different ways, check out this bit hacks page. Gustavo is mentoring for Classpert’s Building a Language course. (This is where Elecia teaches Making Embedded Systems.) The conjecture about a shortage of electrical engineers was from The Register. Transcript
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