Embedded

Andrei Chichak and Alvaro Prieto ( @alvaroprieto ) join us to talk about bits and how to manipulate them. Alvaro is host of the Unnamed Reverse Engineering podcast. His other Embedded appearances are 130 , 200 , and 215 . Andrei ("Andrei from the Great White North") works at CBF Systems . His other Embedded appearances are 99 , 114 , 139 , and 200 . Andrei wrote about bit manipulation as part of E...

Jasmine Brackett ( @asiwatch ) spoke with us about @Tindie 's electronics marketplace, this year's Hackaday Prize , and tips for wearable electronics. If you want to buy on Tindie, check out their homepage tindie.com . If you want to sell, that is straightforward too: tindie.com/about/sell .   There is an Embedded contest for the Tindie Blinky LED badge , a nifty little learn to solder kit. Contes...

What do you do after space debris, hacking dinosaurs, and judging robots? If you are Dr. Lucy Rogers ( @DrLucyRogers ), you build an organization devoted to promoting the Making industry: Guild of Makers ( @GuildOfMakers ) Lucy's personal site is lucyrogers.com . She wrote the book It's ONLY Rocket Science: An Introduction in Plain English . Guild of Maker's Twitter hack chats are weekly on Tuesda...

Dan Saks answers many questions about C++ in embedded systems: where it works, where it doesn't, and a path to getting started.  Dan Saks  is the founder and president of Saks & Associates. He was a columnist for The C/C++ Users Journal, Embedded Systems Design and several other publications. He also served as secretary of the ANSI and ISO C++ standards committee in its early years.  We touched on...

Chris and Elecia answered some listener questions about dynamic memory and shared code. Then Elecia gave a presentation about ShotSpotter , the gunshot location system she worked on. Elecia enjoyed The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America's Enemies by Jason Fagone. Ben is the editor of HackSpace , a new magazine about making (and hack...

Jan Jongboom ( @janjongboom ) of Mbed ( @ArmMbed ) joined us to talk about compilers, online hardware simulators, and inference on embedded devices. Find out more about Mbed on mbed.com . The board simulator is at labs.mbed.com (Mbed OS Simulator). The code for the simulator is on Jan's Github . Mbed Labs also has the uTensor inference framework for using TensorFlow models on devices. You can see...

Roger Linn ( @roger_linn ) gave us new ideas about musical instruments, detailing how wonderful expressive control, 3D buttons, and keyscanning can be. Roger's company is Roger Linn Design . We talked extensively about the LinnStrument , some about the AdrenaLinn for guitar, and only a little bit about the analog drum machine Tempest . A key matrix circuit is a popular way to handle a large number...

We spoke to author Robin Sloan ( @robinsloan ) about his books and near-future science fiction. Robin wrote Mr. Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore and Sourdough . Robin's website is robinsloan.com . Go there for some short stories, sign up for his newsletter and check out his new 'zine (also at wizard.limo ). Oh! Don't forget his blog, including a description of his neural net for audio generation and f...

Dustin Franklin of NVIDIA ( @NVIDIAEmbedded ) spoke with us about the Jetson TX2 , a board designed to bring AI into embedded systems. Dusty wrote Two Days to a Demo , both the original supervised learning version and the newer reinforcement learning version . In general, check out Dusty's github repo to see what's new. Also, The Redtail project is an autonomous navigation system for drones and la...

Chris and Elecia chatted about listener emails, and other stuff and things. Elecia wrote a book called Making Embedded Systems , if you want to see the chapter about interrupts and timers, hit the contact link on embedded.fm . We also recommend our blog , Chris Svec wrote about the MSP430 from a microprocessor point of view ( ESE101 ) and Andrei Chichak wrote about an ST processor with a more prag...

We spoke with Jackson Keating ( @jacksonakeating ) about Bluetooth Low Energy, going over GATTs layouts and the general BLE usage. While Jackson prefers the Bluetooth spec as the best reading explanation, Elecia liked the Adafruit BLE introduction . She wrote about some of her initial experiences with different chips and Chris Svec wrote about BLE roles . We all agreed that the examples and tutori...

Tim O'Reilly ( @timoreilly ) talks about economics, books, and the future. Check out Tim's new book, WTF: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us . And yes, this is Tim O'Reilly of   O'Reilly books . Elecia's Making Embedded Systems has a great-eared nightjar, but she's finally adjusted to a modern dinosaur on her cover.

Sunshine Jones ( @Sunshine_Jones ) spoke with us about synthesizers, electronics, and philosophy. Sunshine's music is most easily found at TheUrgencyOfChange.com . His writing is at Sunshine-Jones.com . We talked about Sunshine's User's Guide to the Roland SE-02 . That includes Ahmed, a track produced using only the SE-02. Sunshine also wrote about building a polysynth . The intro music is an exce...

Nick Kartsioukas ( @ExplodingLemur ) spoke with us about information security, melting down spectres, lemurs, and sensible resolutions. Nick recommends Aumasson's Serious Cryptography (also available from NoStarch ) as a good orientation. (Offline, he also recommended Shneier's Secrets and Lies .)   When thinking about security, you need to develop your threat model ( EFF ) and not panic ( Mickens...

The Amp Hour and Embedded join up to send a holiday letter to listeners. Chris G is ever improving Contextual Electronics . Chris W has a new band: 12AX7 . Elecia still has a book: Making Embedded Systems . Amp Hour episodes mentioned in this one: 372: Where Chris and Dave talk about 2017 304: Alexa jokes 281: The first Amp Hour / Embedded show, with call ins 256: The first time Chris W was on the...

Anthony Navarro ( @avnavarro42 ) of Udacity ( @udacity ) spoke with us about learning. We talked about the Dreyfus model of skill acquisition (an education-oriented technical readiness level ) and a little about on trunk skills vs. leaf skills . Elecia took Udacity's term 1 of Self-Driving Car Nanodegree and is planning to take the free AI for Robotics course next. Anthony is enjoying soldering le...

Jay Carlson (@jaydcarlson), author of The Amazing $1 Microcontroller, joined us to talk about comparing microcontrollers and determining our biases. This was an in-depth comparison of different micro features. Jay is an electrical engineer specializing in electronics design and embedded programming ( contact ). His blog is new and interesting. We talked to SEGGER's Dirk Akeman about JLink on #218:...

Maria Gorlatova spoke with us about how the combination of devices and cloud computing will change the world as we know it. Maria's bio , blog , and LinkedIn page . Other topics: Federated Learning from Google AWS Greengrass from Amazon Black Mirror from Netflix Note: we really should have talked about Amazon and FreeRTOS . I heard another podcast might have mentioned it. We'll try to get more inf...

Windell Oskay ( @Oskay ) of Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories  ( @EMSL ) told us about co-authoring a book:  The Annotated Build-It-Yourself Science Laboratory . Some great EMSL links: A signed copy of Windell's book Dis-integrated 555 timer kit Candle flicker LEDs Food in specimen jars EMSL blog post Spherical pen plotter ( EggBot Pro! ) The book Chris brought up was Thinking Physics . Windell is a...

Andrei Chichak joins Elecia and Christopher to do a deep dive into the world of interrupts. Andrei writes on our blog: Embedded Wednesdays . He has written specifically about interrupts in multiple ways: general introduction , buttons and debouncing , peripheral data transfer via DMA , and so on). The knock-knock joke comes from Chris Svec's Embedded.fm blog post on interrupts . Jack Ganssle on de...

Christopher ( @stoneymonster ) and Elecia ( @logicalelegance ) chat about listener questions and things they've been up to. A listener turned Chris on to Ray Wilson and his Music From Outer Space website on DIY analog synths and book Make: Analog Synthesizers . After collecting parts for a total DIY, he found and built a neat kit: Kastle Synth (as heard on the show) and has connected it to his Rol...

Jonathan Beri ( @beriberikix ) spoke with us about his double life:  Particle.io product manager by day, maker by night (and weekends). Jonathan wrote a chapter about piDuino5 Mobile Robot Platform in JavaScript Robotics . Product manager resources from product.careers and Ken Norton's Newsletter . For an alternate take, there is a good cartoon about effective product management from Henrik Kniber...

Author Jimmy Soni ( @jimmyasoni ) spoke with us about his biography of Claude Shannon,  founder of information theory and digital circuit theory. A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age by Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman. For an introduction to the book, read their post 10,000 Hours With Claude Shannon: How A Genius Thinks, Works, and Lives . Rome's Last Citizen: The Life and Le...

Ben Hencke ( @im889 ) spoke with us about OHWS, Tindie, and blinking lights. Ben sells his Pixelblaze WiFi LED controller on his ElectroMage store on Tindie . It is based on the ESP8266 and uses the DotStar (APA102) lights . To hear John Leeman's trip report on the Open Hardware Summit (OHWS), listen to Don't Panic Geocast, Episode 140 – "Juicero of Tractors" Ben's websites are bhencke.com and ele...

Josh Bleecher Snyder ( @offbymany ) joined us to talk about PayPal's Beacon , being acquired, the Go programming language, BTLE, computer vision, and working at a large company after founding small ones. Bluetooth Low Energy: A Developer's Handbook  by Robin Heydon TI CC2540 BTLE module Learning OpenCV: Computer Vision  by Gary Bradski and Adrian Kaehler Gatt is a Go package for building Bluetooth...