Embedded

Chris and Elecia chat about tools, interrupts, and general happenings.  Thank you to Newark for supporting the show! The part that was not guessed was an RF FET: MRF1K50HR5 . Elecia found MCU on Eclipse (Eric Styger)'s tutorials on Visual Studio Code for C/C++ with ARM Cortex-M ( Part 1 ). Embedded has a Patreon page where you can get access to the Slack group. The book club is starting Prototype...

Dr. Shirley Davis spoke with us about her book: Diversity, Equity & Inclusion For Dummies. Dr. Davis is a speaker and consultant on diversity, equity, and inclusion topics; her website is drshirleydavis.com .  Dr. Davis' books include: Diversity, Equity & Inclusion For Dummies Living Beyond "What If?": Release the Limits and Realize Your Dreams The Seat: How to Get Invited to the Table When You're...

This week we talk about CircuitPython with Adafruit's Kattni Rembor and Scott Shawcroft. The suggested first board is CircuitPlayground Express with LEDs, sensors, and buttons. CircuitPython is also available for many other boards including the BLE Feather (NRF52832). For a basic introduction take a look at What is CircuitPython and see some example scripts . To dig a little deeper, check out the...

Machine learning engineer and science fiction author S. B. Divya joined us to talk about artificial intelligence, robotics, and humanity. Divya's first full-length book is Machinehood which has been nominated for a  Nebula (as was her novella Runtime ). You can find more about Divya on her website ( sbdivya.com ) or on her Wikipedia page . Divya also co-hosted EscapePod , a podcast of science fict...

Mihir Shah of Royal Circuits joined us to talk about how PCBs are fabricated and how companies are funded. Mihir was CEO of InspectAR before they were acquired by Cadence. Mihir works for Royal Circuits and runs a newsletter called TheAnalog.io We talked about InspectAR on Embedded 384: What Is a Board File? with Liam Cadigan. Transcript for this show This episode is sponsored by Newark , a leadin...

Jorvon Moss (Odd Jayy) joined us to talk about making robots, steampunk aesthetics, uploading consciousness to AIs, and the importance of drawing. You can find Jay on Twitter ( @Odd_Jayy ) and Instagram ( @odd_jayy ). He's been moving his Hackster projects over to Digikey's Maker.io space: www.digikey.com/en/maker . Jay's projects are collected here . Elecia brought up the science fiction book Mac...

Chris and Elecia talk about burnout, a SPI + RTOS bug, newsletters, receiving feedback, Elecia's class, and listener projects. Elecia's Making Embedded Systems course on Classpert is starting a new cohort on March 19th. She gave a live talk related to the class about looking beneath the surface of Arduino ( YouTube version ). She's excited about the Wokwi Raspberry Pi Pico simulator with C . Want...

Reinhard Keil joined us to talk about creating the Keil compiler, the 8051 processor, Arm's CMSIS, and the new cloud-based Keil Studio IDE.  MDK-Community is a new free-for-non-commercial use, not-code-size restricted version of the Keil compiler (+ everything else).  CMSIS is a set of open source components for use with Arm processors. The signal processing and neural net components are optimized...

Shawn Hymel spoke to us about creating education videos and written tutorials; marketing by and for engineers; and bowties. You can find Shawn teaching FPGAs, RTOSs and other interesting topics on Digikey's YouTube channel . Shawn also has two embedded Machine Learning courses on Coursera (free!).  Or start at his personal site: shawnhymel.com where you can find written tutorials like How to Set U...

Chris Svec of iRobot and Phillip Johnston of Embedded Artistry join Christopher and Elecia to talk about the hows and whys of estimating software schedules.. The article that started the discussion was Agile Otter's Platitudes of Doom .  You can participate in these sorts of discussions on the Embedded Slack Channel by supporting Embedded on Patreon .  On Phillip's Embedded Artistry Website you ca...

Matthew Liberty shared good advice for lowering power. We talk about different ways to measure current (Matt has a nice write-up ) and things software can do to decrease power consumption. Sleeping is critical, of course, as is choosing your clock speed and setting the GPIOs to good states. Everything is fine until you start getting into the microamps, then your multimeter measurements may start t...

Miro Samek joins us to discuss designing systems, state machines, and teaching courses. Miro's company is Quantum Leaps ( state-machine.com ) which provides commercial licensing for QP Real-Time Embedded Frameworks.  It is an open source project, the code can be found on github: github.com/QuantumLeaps/qpc   One of the key concepts is an Active Object which aids in real-time system development, es...

Christopher and Elecia celebrate their 400th episode by discussing what has (and hasn't) changed in embedded systems over the last 9 years

Jen Costillo joined us to talk about voice acting, reverse engineering, podcasting, and dance. Jen's podcast is the Unnamed Reverse Engineering Podcast , found in all your usual podcast places. Jen and her co-host Alvaro were on an episode of Opposable Thumbs podcast . Find Jen on Twitter at @RebelbotJen (also @unnamed_show and @catmachinesSF ). Rebelbot.com has her blog and Cat Machines Dance is...

Tom Anderson explains radio frequency electronics (RF). Elecia and Christopher try to keep up. We also took a detour into bass guitar electronics. One confusing jargon part is that radio power (in dBm) is discussed as though it is voltage. For example, 10 dBM is 2V peak-to-peak; there is an implied 50 ohm resistor in the P=V*V/R calculation. The the wiki for more about decibel-milliwatts. Tom talk...

We spoke with Phillip Johnston ( @mbeddedartistry ) of Embedded Artistry about consulting, writing, and learning. In the Embedded Artistry welcome page , there is a list of Phillip's favorite articles as well as his most popular articles. Some of Phillip's favorites include: Embedded Rules of Thumb Improving SW with 5 LW Processes Learning from the Boeing 737 MAX saga We also talked about code rev...

Chris and Elecia ring in the new year with a discussion of projects, hobbies, origami, DMA, music, and the new-and-improved Embedded.fm newsletter... Pepto Bismol can be converted to metal bismuth ( YouTube ) which can be turned into lovely sculptures . Chris liked his new book, Art of NASA: The Illustrations That Sold the Missions by Piers Bizony.  Elecia liked hers, Curved Origami: Unlocking the...

Limor Fried of Adafruit spoke with us about engineering, education, and business.  Some new boards we talked about include the PyGamer and PyBadge (which also has a lower cost version ). TinyUSB , an open and tiny USB stack from Hathach. In addition to the many excellent tutorials there are some interesting business related posts on Adafruit Learn : How to Build a Hardware Startup and How to Start...

Uri Shaked shows us Wokwi, his board and processor simulator. We checked out Arduino code in GDB and then looked at his simulator for the Cortex-M0 Raspberry Pi Pico.  First, you should totally  look at Wokwi.com . As Christopher noted, signing up for an account shows you many other things. Then you can go look at the processors written in TypeScript in Uri's Github repos: github.com/urish . Find...

Tyler Hoffman joined us to talk about developing developer tools and how to drag your organization out of the stone age. You can use GDB and Python together? Yes, yes you can . And it will change your debugging habits. (You can find many other great posts from Memfault's Interrupt blog including one about Unit Testing Basics .)  Tyler is a co-founder at Memfault ( memfault.com ), a company that wo...

Professor HyunJoo Oh of GeorgiaTech spoke to us about paper machines, paper mechanical movements, paper sensors, paper tiny Jansen Strandbeests, and paper art. HyunJoo is a professor at GeorgiaTech . She is the director of the CoDe Craft group. Some of the projects we spoke about can be found on the CoDe Craft Projects page .  PaperMech.net has demonstrations of different mechanical movements as w...

Professor Carlotta Berry from Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology joined us to talk about robotics, PID tuning, engineering education, ethics, her book, and standing up in front of a classroom. Carlotta's book is Mobile Robotics for Multidisciplinary Study (Synthesis Lectures on Control and Mechatronics) .  She has a page at Rose-Hulman as well as a personal blog and a consulting site ( NoireSTEMi...

Colin O'Flynn ( @colinoflynn ) spoke with us about security research, power analysis, and hotdogs. Colin's company is NewAE and you can see his Introduction to Side-Channel Power Analysis video as an intro to his training course. Or you can buy your own ChipWhisperer and go through his extensive tutorials on the wiki pages. ChipWhisperer on Hackaday ColinOFlynn.com Some FPGA resource mentioned: Fp...

Debra Ansell joined us to talk about making light up accessories, patenting ideas, and sharing projects. Debra's project website is geekmomprojects.com , she's @geekmomprojects on Twitter and Instagram . Her github repo uses the same ID: github.com/geekmomprojects/ .  We talked about using coin cell batteries as switches. Many other accessories do this but one of our favorites was the Tiny Edge Li...

Chris and Elecia chat about their current projects and ideas. Elecia is teaching Making Embedded Systems at Classpert . The course is based on her book with lectures to extend the information, quizzes, homework, mentors, synchronous classes, and a final project. Starting Nov 13th, the first cohort is full but you can join the waiting list. The second cohort starts in February. Elecia is also givin...