Embedded

Uri Shaked surprises us with a chat about silicon design when we were expecting to talk about a web-based board simulator.  If you want to try your hand at silicon design, check out Tiny Tapeout , a way to possibly get your design on to real silicon. The digital design guide is a great way to start looking at how chips work. If you aren't quite ready for silicon, Wokwi has a Verilog simulator wher...

Nathan Jones has been talking about building command line interfaces, good design practices in C, creating MCU boards, wielding the PIC of destiny, and going beyond Arduino. As we are too lazy to attend the conferences, we asked him to give us the highlights.  Nathan is giving two conference talks at Crowd Supply's Teardown 2023 June 23-24 in Portland, Oregon: Make Your Own MCU Board Build HackerB...

Julia Evans spoke with us about how computers compute. We discussed number representation including floating point as well as Julia's extensive collection of 'zines and comics. Julia's zines about debugging, managers, Linux commands, and more are available on WizardZines.com . If you want samples, check out the comics section. Also, the experiments (aka playgrounds) are great additions to the zine...

Phillip Johnston of Embedded Artistry , Tyler Hoffman of Memfault , and Elecia White discuss the software tasks that tend to fall through the cracks after the device has all its features but before it is in customers' hands. Noah Pendleton of Memfault was the moderator.  You can see the video on the Embedded YouTube channel or directly from memfault (also see their other panels and webinars ). Mem...

Kari Love joined us to talk about soft robotics, robots in religion, and squishiness. Kari co-authored Soft Robotics: A DIY Introduction to Squishy, Stretchy, and Flexible Robots . Her website is karimakes.com . She was previously on Embedded 189: The Squishiness Factor One of the pneumatic drives that we mentioned was a Hackaday Prize Winner: FlowIO . Another was the Soft Robotics Toolkit . Howev...

Chris and Elecia talk about internetting your thing, motivating yourself with cheese, a pile of scrabble letters, an electric ouija board, and a supervillain origin story. Elecia will be on a Memfault Panel on June 1, 2023: From Concept to Launch: What It Takes to Build and Ship a New Device   Elecia was on Alpenglow's Industries Solder Sesh #60 with Carrie Sundra. See the highlights (or the whole...

Carl Bugeja makes actuators out of PCBs, puts them to work flapping origami bird wings (or moving robot rovers), and takes videos of the whole process. Oh, and get this, self-soldering circuits.  First, origami: flap actuators video . Your source for the PCB actuators: flexar.io Carl's YouTube channel is filled with hardware, software, successes, and misses. Check out his tiny foldable rover and t...

We spoke with Chris Gammell about IoT, podcasting, relaxing, and learning. Chris works at Golioth.io . They have a neat blog that talks about reference designs, Zephyr RTOS, and making products. We talked about ESP chips which are made by Espressif . The ESP32 line is RISC-V. Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) Some YouTube channels we discussed: Wendover Productions : explaining stuff CGP Gre...

Chris and Elecia talk about ChatGPT, conferences, online compilers, and Ardupilot. Compiler Explorer: godbolt.org (and function pointer example ) Jupyter Notebooks with colab: colab.research.google.com/ (and one of Elecia's origami pattern generator collabs ) Sign up for the Embedded newsletter ! Support us on Patreon . Conferences and happenings: Hackaday Prize Embedded Online Conference : late A...

We spoke with Charlyn Gonda about making things glow, dealing with imposter syndrome, and using origami. Charlyn's website is charlyn.codes , the projects we talked about are documented there. You can find her on Instagram ( @chardane ) and Mastodon ( https://leds.social/@charlyn ). Adafruit came up a lot in this episode.  NeoPixel Jewel DotStar High Density 8x8 Grid SAMD21 QT Py and RP2040 QT Py...

Peter Griffin spoke with us about operant boxes, juggling many projects, getting into embedded systems, and bottle rockets.  When we talked about 3D printing, Peter mentioned the Maker Muse Clearance and Tolerance 3D Printer Gauge . The book we mentioned was Hot Seat by Dan Shapiro ( Embedded 125: I Like Cheat Codes ). Peter on Github Transcript Please note that Peter Griffin spoke with Embedded.f...

Chris and Elecia talk about photons, comets, patterns, other flying objects, and cameras. Chris uses PixInsight for processing  and has an Ioptron Sky Tracker. Apologies to our southern hemisphere listeners because Polaris is not visible there. There are (of course) other ways to align and even in the northern hemisphere more modern trackers don't necessarily need Polaris. Star Exterminator : who...

Adafruit's Liz Clark (BlitzCityDIY) spoke with us about MIDI, music, and tutorials.  Liz's Adafruit Tutorials include MIDI for Makers CircuitPython Trombone Champ Controller Mini LED Matrix Audio Visualizer   CircuitPython MIDI to CV Skull Liz sometimes hosts the Adafruit Show and Tell which is Wednesdays 7:30pm ET. Speaking of Adafruit videos, we mentioned the Fusion 360 tutorial on Snap Fit Case...

Chris and Elecia talk with Mark Smith (aka SmittyHalibut and N6MTS) about amateur radio, interconnect standards, and podcasting. Mark is a host of the Ham Radio Workbench podcast. His company is Halibut Electronics ( electronics.halibut.com ). He's been working on Open Headset Interconnect Standard and Satellite Optimized Amateur Radio (SOAR) . Find Mark as SmittyHalibut on YouTube , github , and...

Chris and Elecia talk to Jeff Gable and Luca Ingianni of the Agile Embedded podcast, discussing the definition of Agile, agreeing about some things, and disagreeing about others. Agile Embedded can be found in your usual podcast locations or get it from the source: https://agileembeddedpodcast.com/ Jeff's website is jeffgable.com and Luca's is luca.engineer Transcript

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 ) Aman...

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

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 L...

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, get...

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

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 com...