Embedded

Carles Cufí spoke with us about Zephyr, Nordic, learning, open source development, and corporate goals.  Carles had some great suggestions for learning Zephyr: Memfault Interrupt Practical Zephyr blog series Nordic's Developer Academy   Zephyr's Discord server Zephyr's YouTube channel ( @ZephyrProject ), sorted by views  Macrobatics term is from Zephyr Devicetree Mysteries, Solved - Marti Bolivar,...

Jan Rychter joined us to talk about building a company, electronic components, and software design. Jan is the founder and engineer at PartsBox.com . If you are interested in the meta-analysis of the data, check out his article on the Top Ten Hobby Parts and the Electronic Component Database ,  You can find out more about Jan through his website ( jan.rychter.com ), LinkedIn , o r Mastodon . Trans...

Kwabena Agyeman joined Chris and Elecia to talk about optimization, cameras, machine learning, and vision systems.  Kwabena is the head of OpenMV ( openmv.io ), an open source and open hardware system that runs machine learning algorithms on vision data. It uses MicroPython as a development environment so getting started is easy.  Their github repositories are under github.com/openmv . You can fin...

Lee Wilkins joined Chris and Elecia to talk about The Open Source Hardware Association, the Open Hardware Summit, and zine culture. The Open Source Hardware Association (OSHWA) provides certification and support for creating open source hardware. The Open Hardware Summit is happening May 3-4, 2024. It is in Montreal, Canada. It also has many online components including a Discord and online Unconfe...

Chris and Elecia talk about the Embedded Online Conference, their experience learning Zephyr, and some listener questions. Elecia will be presenting on Creating Chaos and Hard Faults at the Embedded Online Conference , Apr 29 - May 3, 2024. Some other talks that look interesting: The Power of a Look-up Table by Nathan Jones Zephyr Tools To Debug Hardware by Chris Gammell Breaking Good: Why Virtual...

Logic gates and origami? Professor Inna Zakharevich joined us to talk about Turing complete origami crease patterns.  We started talking about Turing completeness which led to a Conway's Game of Life-like 2D cellular automaton called Rule 110 (Wikipedia) which can be implemented with logic gates (AND, OR, NOT). These logic gates can be implemented as creases in paper (with the direction of the cre...

Philip Koopman joined us to talk about how modulo 255 vs 256 makes a huge difference in checksum error detection, how to get the most out of your checksum or CRC, and why understanding how they work is worth the effort. Philip has recently published Understanding Checksums and Cyclic Redundancy Checks . He's better known for Better Embedded System Software as well as his two books about safety and...

Making Embedded Systems, 2nd Edition came out today! Chris and Elecia talk about the changes, the writing, but not the eldritch horror. Then we talk about pianos and origami.  The electronic version is available now on Amazon , ebooks.com , Google Play and where you get your ebooks. The paper copy will be out in about two weeks, you can preorder now. It is also available on the O'Reilly Learning S...

Where electronics meets music, there is a board called Daisy. Created by ElectroSmith, Andrew Ikenberry, the goal of the board is to teach computers to sing. Andrew joined us to talk about music, audio processing, instruments, product design, and electronic manufacturing.  See the Electrosmith website, specifically the Daisy Seed . The electro-smith github repository is extensive (with many Daisy...

Helen Leigh joined us to talk about putting together conferences (including Teardown 2024), indie hardware producers (including via Crowd Supply), and building communities. Teardown will be June 21-23 in Portland, OR, USA. More information about attending or presenting . Early bird tickets are available for a limited time! Teardown is put on by Crowd Supply , a company that helps hardware companie...

Chris and Elecia chat with each other about motor encoder reading methods, conferences coming up, soldering irons, schematic reviews, looking for a new job, and general life.  Some conferences coming up in the embedded space: Embedded Online , April 29-May 4, virtual (Elecia will be speaking) Open Hardware Summit in May 3-4, Montreal, Canada Embedded World in April 9-11 in Nuremburg, Germany Evil...

Anders Nielsen joined us to talk about why the 6502 is the best processor.  Anders also sells 65uino kits on his store: imania.dk . For more explanation of what they are, how they work, attaching peripherals, and programming in assembly, look at Anders' YouTube channel @AndersNielsenAA , read his blog on abnielsen.com , or read about it on its Hackaday.io project page .** We also mentioned Ben Eat...

Chris and Elecia talk about cars, fleeting moments of fame, their year, and the sorry state of tools in the embedded space. Chris became internet famous for asking a car dealership's chatbot (powered by ChatGPT) to generate Python code for fluid dynamics problems . After this, someone else asked the chatbot to sell a car for $1.  Pass the Bricks is an organization that takes Lego bricks and turns...

Ralph Hempel spoke with us about the development of Lego Mindstorms from hacking the initial interface to running Debian Linux as well as programming Mindstorms in Python. Happy 25th birthday to Lego Mindstorms! Pybricks is a MicroPython based coding environment that works across all Lego PoweredUp hubs and on the latest Mindstorms elements. The creators are David Lechner and Laurens Valk. Ralph w...

Yanina Bellini Saibene joined us to discuss teaching, localization, barriers to learning coding, and global communities.  Yani works on Teach Tech Together ( https://teachtogether.tech/ ) with Greg Wilson. It is a fantastic resource if you are learning to teach. It is available in English and Spanish. She also works on The Carpentries which teaches coding and data science skills to researchers wor...

Chris and Elecia talk about their favorite processors, their breakfast preferences, large language model ethics, presents, and Eeyore's birthday. Elecia's new edition of her book  Making Embedded Systems is finished! (Except for a couple months of tech reviews, updating, copyediting, and drawings.) It will be out in March. All of the back issues of Byte Magazine Chris' radio kit that he mentioned...

Kevin Lannen is an embedded systems engineer making powered wheelchairs safer. This sounded interesting to us. Kevin works at LUCI Mobility ( luci.com ). Check out their tear jerker introduction video as well as technical description of over-the-air update concerns on smart wheelchairs . We also talked about the app that goes with the system: LUCI View . You can find Kevin on Twitter ( @kevlan ) a...

Marian Petre spoke to us about her research on how to make software developers better at developing software. Marian is an Emeritus Professor of the School of Computing & Communications at the Open University in the United Kingdom . She also has a Wikipedia page .  The short version of How Expert Programmers Think About Errors is on the NeverWorkInTheory.org page along with other talks about acade...

Chris and Elecia discuss the pros and cons of completing one project or starting a dozen.  Elecia's 2nd edition of Making Embedded Systems is coming out in March. (Preview is on O'Reilly's Learning System .) She's working on a companion repository that is already filled with links and goodies: github.com/eleciawhite/making-embedded-systems .  If you'd like to know more about signal processing, che...

Author, engineer, manager, and professor, Dr. Greg Wilson joined Elecia to talk about teaching, science in computer science, ethics, and policy. The request for curriculum that started the conversation was the Cost of Change , part of NeverWorkInTheory which summarizes scientific literature about software development.  Greg is the founder of Software Carpentry , a site that creates curriculum for...

Professor AnnMarie Thomas spoke with us about playful learning through joy,  whimsy, surprise, and meeting new people.  We also spoke with AnnMarie about how adults can foster an environment that encourages innovation. See more about that (and the interviews of various engineers and makers) in her book Making Makers: Kids, Tools, and the Future of Innovation You can find AnnMarie on Mastodon: mast...

Trond Snekvik spoke with us about developing VSCode extensions and Bluetooth meshes. Trond is a Staff Software Engineer at Nordic Semiconductor. Nordic's Visual Studio Code Extensions include device tree and kconfig support for the Zephyr project as well as tools for nRF Connect.  Trond's github page: github.com/trond-snekvik In 329: At Least 32-Bits, Thank You , Kate Stewart of the Linux Foundati...

Chris and Elecia chat about their ongoing efforts to create and learn. Then they answer some listener questions.  Duck quacks do echo but the echoes seem to align in phase so that there is no interruption making the echo sounds like an extension of the quack ( Mythbusters episode in which Jamie says "Quack, damn you!") Elecia continues to work on Making Embedded Systems, 2nd Edition. The early rel...

Damien George spoke with us about developing with and for MicroPython while Elecia tries not to spill all the secrets about her client. To start at the beginning, you probably want to check out micropython.org . Wait, no, one step back. Before listening to the show, you probably should read the Wikipedia MicroPython entry because we kind of start in the middle in the show. You can find the code on...

Natalie Friedman joins us to discuss when, where, how, and why robots should wear clothing. Natalie is a PhD candidate at Cornell Tech.  Natalie's website is natalie-friedman.com and you can find her papers in the research section. She has an Instagram account: @natalie.victoria.f AIForGood shows several robots dressed in home, business and social attire. Roomba cosplaying a mouse ( Instructable )...