Embedded

George Stocker ( @gortok ) spoke with us about software,  Jewelbots  ( @Jewelbots ) and learning embedded systems to ship the product.  Elecia's book is  Making Embedded Systems . George also recommended  Getting Started with BLE  and  Programming Pearls . The processor we talked about was the  Nordic nRF51 , a BLE system on a chip.

James Cameron of One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) tells us about Forth, science fiction, and laptops. We have some tickets for ARM's  mbed Connect conference  is Oct 24, 2016 in Santa Clara. Will you be in the area? Want to go? Contact us if you want one of our free tickets! (There are still some tickets remaining.)  One Laptop Per Child is  one.laptop.org .  Some getting started information on Forth: ...

Saar Drimer of  Boldport  ( @boldport ) spoke with us about the crossover of art to electronics and building a business around it.  Monthly, the  Boldport Club  ships aesthetically-pleasing electronics kits. We discussed past projects include  The Lady  and  Touchy  on the show. The  seahorse board  is on the blog. Micah Scott ( @scanlime ) has entrancing videos of putting together the first club...

Elecia tries to get Chris to do her homework in preparation for her "Embedded Software: The Tricky Parts" presentation at IEEE-Computer Society meeting in San Jose, CA on Oct 11, 2016. If you  register , you can attend, in person or online! And for free!  We have some tickets for ARM's  mbed Connect conference  is Oct 24, 2016 in Santa Clara. Will you be in the area? Want to go? Contact us if you...

After a few new announcements, we replayed the episode where Jack Ganssle shared his wisdom on being a good embedded software engineer (hint: it takes discipline).  The new announcements include: Book giveaway contest deadline Oct 1st ARM's  mbed Connect conference  is Oct 24th IEEE CS talk by Elecia iRobot has internships (and other jobs), check  their job site  and if you want to apply, email cs...

John Leeman ( @geo_leeman ) spoke with us about geophysics and associated technology. John is one of the hosts of the  Don't Panic GeoCast  ( @dontpanicgeo ,  iTunes ). Some episodes you may like: What if you calibrated your candles differently? Out of the Country  (Brad Jolive on moon rocks) "Rock Drills and Beer" Undersampled Radio John is teaching a course at Penn State called  Techniques of Ge...

Briana Morey from  MC10  ( @mc10inc ) spoke with us about stretchable electronics, Tesla coils and lasers. She works at MC10, creators of the  L'Oreal My UV Patch  as well as the  BioStampRC .  MC10 is hiring ! They are in Lexington, MA, US. The embedded software position is filled already but the EE position is still open. Briana mentioned an excellent science fiction book she'd read recently:  T...

Chris and Elecia chat about Bayes Rule, aliens, bit-banging, VGA, and unit testing. Elecia is working on  A Narwhal's Guide to Bayes' Rule .  ACM has a code of software engineering ethics Toads have trackers ( NPR story ) An  introduction to bit-banging SPI  (Arduino, WS2812) We talked to James Grenning extensively about testing on  30: Eventually Lightning Strikes  (and about his excellent book ...

Bob Apthorpe ( @arclight ) spoke with us about software, nuclear engineering, and improv. Bob is giving away three books! Send in your guess by October 1, 2016. One entry per person. (More info below.) Hackaday SuperCon  is Nov 5-6, in Pasadena, CA. Bob's long languishing blog is  overscope.cynistar.net . Peep (The Network Aualizer): Monitoring Your Network with Sound Safety-I and Safety-II: The P...

Shimona Carvalho ( @shimonkey ) joins us to talk about user interface design in embedded systems. Then we talk about internationalization and localization. Then photography. Shimona's website is  shimonacarvalho.com  and her  Flicker account is shimonkey . For an introduction to user interface design, Shimona recommended  The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman . Internationalization and local...

Christopher White resurrects an Apple ][+ with his brother Matthew White. This is a show about the software Christopher and Matthew wrote when they were kids and the hardware they wrote it on. Matthew's favorite fictional robot (we should have asked):  Venus Probe from Six Million Dollar Man . We did ask about his favorite fictional computer and there is a  video  for that too. Apple ][+ Wiki Time...

Elecia went to Hackaday's SuperCon, got to announce the Hackaday Prize 2015 winners , then talked to the organizers about their conference. The guests this week were (in order of appearance): Amber Cunningham Dan Hienzsch  ( 115: Datasheeps ) Adam Fabio Brian Benchoff Aleksandar Bradic Sophi Kravitz  ( 77: Goldfish, Fetch My Slippers!  and 91: Save Us from Astronauts ) Mike Szczys  ( 69: Look at t...

Nadya Peek ( @nadyapeek ) joined us to talk about making machines that build things.  Nadya's website is  infosyncratic.nl , which includes her blog. Nadya's dissertation defense on  Making Machines that Make: Object-Oriented Hardware Meets Object-Oriented Software  was standing room only. MIT Center For Bits and Atoms , which studies "how to turn data into things, and things into data." Mods.cba....

Valve's Alan Yates ( @vk2zay ) spoke with us about the science and technology of virtual reality.  Elecia looked at the  iFixIt Teardown of the HTC Vive system  as she was unwilling to take apart Christopher's system.  Alan shared some of his other favorite reverse engineering efforts:  Doc OK's Lighthouse videos , documentation on  github by nairol , and a  blog by Trammell Hudson . Alan's sensor...

Kat Scott ( @kscottz ) gave us an introduction to computer vision. She co-authored the O'Reilly Python book  Practical Computer Vision with SimpleCV: The Simple Way to Make Technology See . The book's website is  SimpleCV.org . Kat also suggested looking at the samples in the  OpenCV Github repo .  To integrate computer vision into a robot or manufacturing system, Kat mentioned ROS (Robot Operatin...

Daniel Hienzsch ( @rheingoldheavy ) and Majenta Strongheart ( majentastronghe _art ) gave us suggestions on setting up a home shop and information on setting up a maker space. Daniel is the resident engineer at SupplyFrame's Pasadena  Design Lab . He still the owns and runs  RheingoldHeavy.com , a company devoted to educational boards, as we talked about on episode  115: Datasheeps . Majenta's web...

Chris and Elecia talk to each other about compiler optimizations, bit banging I2C, listener emails, and small-town parades. Games to learn/play with assembly languages include The Human Resource Machine by Tomorrow Corporation  and TIS-100 by Zachtronics . We've been enjoying the Embedded Thoughts  blog. And Chris is reading Practical Electronics for Inventors and liking it.  We talked a little ab...

Fabien Chouteau ( @DesChips ) of AdaCore ( @AdaCoreCompany ) spoke with us about the Make with Ada Programming Competition. Giveaway boards are GONE.  The Ada programming language ( wiki ) is interesting in that it was designed for safety critical embedded systems (actually designed, requirements doc and everything!). The Ada Information Clearinghouse has a nice list of tutorials and books  as doe...

Robb Walters of Flybrix ( @flybrix ) spoke with us about LEGO-based drones. We graciously let him leave with all his hardware. This time. For a limited time, you can get an Embedded.fm tshirt:  teespring.com/embedded-fm . Order by the end of June or miss out. ( More info about the shirts .) You can order your Flybrix kit  and or read their controller code on github  (or their controller app code )...

Jeri Ellsworth ( @jeriellsworth) spoke with us about the latest developments at CastAR, hiring engineers, and her favorite engine. Embedded.fm T-Shirts are available until the end of June on Teespring ( more info ). CastAR  is making an augmented reality system. They are in Palo Alto, CA, USA and they are hiring .  They work with Playground . Jeri was last on Embedded.fm episode 23: Go For Everyth...

Jonathan Bradshaw spoke with us about working with hardware engineers, schematic reviews, and FPGAs. At the end of the podcast, Jonathan made a pitch for folks to submit proposals for the IEEE Southern Power Electronics Conference in Auckland in December. The FPGA boards Elecia mentioned were the XLR8 board  and the Papillio  platform (more on the latter in show #66 ). By the way, The Amp Hour is...

Jeff Keyzer ( @MightyOhm ) joined us to talk about consumer manufacturing, how to solder, and having a full time job and a kit company. Jeff's blog is on MightyOhm.com . The Geiger Counter kit is available at MightyOhm.com/geiger . The really, really useful Soldering Is Easy comic book is MightyOhm.com/soldercomic . At Valve, Jeff worked on the Steam Controller (hardware specs at bottom of the Val...

Patrick Yeon of Planet Labs spoke with us about making satellites. We discussed a method of using orientation to control drag to control speed . While Patrick wasn't sure what he could say about GPS receivers on satellites,  another site  describes them as part of the flock. Sign up to get access to the huge Open California data set. Planet has many applications and their blog shows off some inter...

Chris and Elecia chat about hobbies and respond to listener feedback and questions. Chris was on an episode of Let's Drone Out, you can listen to it here  or search in your favorite podcast platform. It is recorded and broadcast live every Thursday at 8 P.M. (UTC+1) on Powering On . Chris' new quadcopter is a Vortex 285 . It runs Clean Flight , an open source flight controller software package. Wh...

Paul Sidenblad spoke to us about his engineering career, starting off with GE's work on the Gambit spy satellite.   Google Protobufs Elecia read Eye in the Sky: The Story of the CORONA Spy Satellites  a few years ago and remembers liking it, though this was the first time the information was useful.