Embedded

It's another episode with Elecia and Chris. This week they discuss people that have influenced their lives and careers, thinking about past career choices and regrets therein, identities, the Embedded Slack book club, and electronic projects. Chris is currently taking Dogbotic's DIY Rhythm Widgets course which covers making an analog drum machine from components. We had Dogbotic founder Kirk Pears...

Emily Lovell spoke with us about teaching how to contribute to open source, including her own experience creating the LilyTiny as a Master's student and researching the impact as a PhD student.  The LilyTiny work was done in conjunction with Leah Buechley ( Embedded episode 382 ). See the paper The LilyTiny: A Case Study in Expanding Access to Electronic Textiles or watch the video . UCSC Open Sou...

Chris and Elecia talk about Murderbot,  LLMs (AI), bikes, control algorithms, and fancy math.  The website with the ecology jobs is wildlabs.net from 501: inside the Armpit of Giraffe with Meredith Palmer and Akiba..  The algorithm Elecia mentioned was from Patent US7370713B1 . The Control Bootcamp YouTube series is a great introduction to control systems beyond PIDs There is also a book from the...

We spoke with ecologist Dr. Meredith Palmer and embedded engineer Akiba about lions, terror, and technology.  Akiba works for FreakLabs.org on global conservation projects. We talked about their Boombox which Meredith uses to create experiments to map the landscape of fear in predator/prey relationships. While this may look like pranking animals with jump scares, well, there is real science being...

Komathi Sundaram spoke with us about her enthusiasm for tests and test automation. We talked about the different joys of testing vs. development, setting up CI servers, and different kinds of tests including unit, hardware-in-the-loop, and simulation. It may sound dry but we had a lot of fun. Komathi's site is TheKomSea.com which hosts her blog as well as contact info. She will be speaking on auto...

We spoke with Janet Hansen about the world of professional costumery (with electronics) and becoming an artist. Janet's business is Enlighted where you can find custom illuminated clothing as well as Janet's ready-made art. Janet's personal site is janethansen.com which is more focused on her artistic pursuits. Janet mentioned Seeed's MSGEQ7 . We talked about Janet's light up pillow with Debra Ans...

At the end of this week's show, Elecia reads a Winnie the Pooh poem as Cookie Monster death metal. Before that, Chris and Elecia chat about mental health, journaling, personal projects, and listener questions.  Please sign up for the Nordic Giveaway !  You can also sign up for the Embedded newsletter . Maybe now with job postings? Elecia's journaling notebook is this one on JetPens (which is where...

OpenMV has a new Kickstarter so CEO Kwabena Agyeman chatted with us about more powerful (and smaller!) programmable cameras.  See OpenMV 's site for their existing cameras. See their (already funded!) kickstarter page for the super powerful N6 and the ridiculously small AE3. Note that OpenMV still is committed to open source. See their github if you want to know more. Edge AI is the idea of puttin...

Professor Shimon Schocken spoke with us about teaching computer science from NAND logic gates to arithmetic units, micro assembly, virtual machines, compilers, operating systems, and the Tetris games. We also talk about good design, good interfaces, and good tests. Shimon's book is Elements of Computing Systems and the website with the course lecture notes, slides, videos, simulators, and everythi...

Professor Cindy Harnett spoke to us about new and different sensors and actuators, primarily designed for soft robotics and fabricated with relatively low cost materials. Cindy is a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Louisville where she runs the Harnett Lab . The papers we discussed are here . You can find a longer list of Cindy's papers on Google Scholar . The...

Debra Ansell joined us to talk about finding friends and exchanging neat gifts, accidentally tricking people into making unmanufacutable boards, and happy, blinking lights. Debra is usually known by the moniker GeekMomProjects (also her website is geekmomprojects.com ). She has been writing for Make Magazine .  Debra won one of the SuperCon badge add-on awards so her poseable Bendy SAO will be ava...

Elecia and Chris talk with each other about the state of Chris' mind, what makes an embedded developer stand out, "LEGO block" based design, unit tests, and astronomy. Whew! Elecia was recently on the Changelog podcast, talking about the world of embedded systems . Chris has been working with Micropython (we talked with Damien George about Micropython on episode 456 ). He's using a Pyboard to star...

Nathan Jones chatted with us about his proposal for a computer architecture book based on a 4-bit computer.  Nathan found the 4-bit computer in the Hackaday SuperCon 2022 badge and was amazed by some of the ideas that folks implemented (see SuperCon Badge Hacking Awards Ceremony ). Nathan spoke at Hackaday SuperCon 2023 on the processor architecture , highlighting some of his ideas for a book. If...

Chris and Elecia spoke with Kirk Pearson about running audio-electronic-art workshops, interesting sounds, and their book Make: Electronic Music from Scratch: A Beginner's Guide to Homegrown Audio Gizmos.  Find the book and a whole kit of parts on the Dogbotic Merch page . A few clicks from there you can find the Workshop List (don't forget the coupon in the show audio).  We also mentioned The Thi...

Nikolaus Correll spoke with us about robots, teaching robotics, and writing books about robots.  Nikolaus is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Colorado, see his lab website (or his Wikipedia page ). We discussed Nikolaus' Introduction to Robotics with Webots Specialization Coursera course (or YouTube Playlist ). These go along with his Introduction to Autonomous Robots (which ca...

Chris and Elecia discuss her origami art show, ponder PRs for solo developers, attempt to explain GDB debugging, and make a to-do list for getting rid of Kanga. Elecia is having an Origami Octopus Garden art show at the Aptos Public Library for the month of November, 2024. The postcard advertisement is below. There are more pictures on her Instagram ( @elecia_white ). The python tessellation gener...

Adrienne Braganza Tacke spoke with us about her book Looks Good To Me: Constructive Code Reviews . It is about how to make code reviews more useful, effective, and congenial.  Adrienne's book is available now as an ebook at manning.com or a paper copy later in the year ( Amazon link ). Check out the example Team Working Agreemen t from Appendix A. Adrienne's personal website is adrienne.io . Trans...

Chris and Elecia chat about simulated robots, portents in the sky, the futility of making plans, and grad school.  A problem with mics led us to delay the show with Shimon Schoken from Nand2Tetris (co-author of Elements of The Elements of Computing Systems: Building a Modern Computer from First Principles ). Look for that later in the year. Elecia is playing with Webots , a robotics physics simula...

Antoine van Gelder spoke to us about making digital musical instruments, USB, and FPGAs.  Antoine works for Great Scott Gadgets , specifically on the Cynthion USB protocol analysis tool that can be used in conjunction with Python and GSG's FaceDancer to act as a new USB device.  While bonding over MurderBot Diaries was a given, Antoine also mentioned NAND2Tetris which Elecia countered with The Ele...

Alan Blackwell spoke with us about the lurking dangers of large language models, the magical nature of artificial intelligence, and the future of interacting with computers.  Alan is the author of Moral Codes: Designing Alternatives to AI  which you can read in its pre-book form here: https://moralcodes.pubpub.org/ Alan's day job is as a Professor of Interdisciplinary Design in the Cambridge Unive...

Chris and Elecia talk to each other about setting aside memory in a linker file, printing using your debugger, looking around a new code base, pointers as optimization, choosing processors, skill trees and merit badges. Elecia's Creating Chaos and Hard Faults talk and slides. STM32 Application Note AN4989 microcontroller debug toolbox includes semihosting. Memfault's Interrupt blog has a good Semi...

Rick Altherr spoke with us about high-speed control, complicated systems, and making quantum computers. If you want to know more about building quantum computers, take a listen to Rick's MacroFab episode: The Nuts and Bolts of Quantum Computing . If you want to make your own quantum circuit simulator, it only takes 27 lines of Python: A Quantum Circuit Simulator in 27 Lines of Python . What about...

Professor Colleen Lewis joined us to talk teaching pointers with stuffies, explaining inheritance through tigers, and computer science pedagogy. Check out her YouTube channel to view her videos explaining CS concepts with physical models. These are also collected on her website: Physical Models of Java . If you are an instructor (or thinking about teaching CS), check out Colleen's CS Teaching Tips...

Chris and Elecia talk about their current adventures in conference talks, play dates, and skunks.  Elecia's talks are available on YouTube: Creating Chaos and Hard Faults : An introduction to hard fault handlings, stack overflows, and debugging hard bugs Introduction to Embedded Systems (O'Reilly Expert Webinar) : An introductions to… well, embedded systems These are both advertising for the 2nd e...

Jerry Twomey spoke with us about his new O'Reilly book Applied Embedded Electronics which covers embedded topics such as EMI, signal processing, control systems and non-ideal components. Jerry is also the principal engineer at Effective Electrons . His articles are linked from there and you can contact him via the site . Here is a 30-day trial for the O'Reilly Learning System . You can take a look...