470: Upping the Chaos Level

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 companies launch products.

Hardware Happy Hour Portland is a regular meetup that Helen organizes. Helen will be hosting a meetup in Oakland, CA, USA on Feb 15: Oakland Sound Hackers. She is also hosting a San Francisco, CA meetup on March 6: Open Hardware Happy Hour. 

We mentioned Alvaro Prieto's USB-or-Me cable tester, for more information this hackster.io article has the deets.

Helen’s personal site is helenleigh.me. She has been on the show twice before in 355: Favorite Ways to Make Noises and 261: Blowing Their Fragile Little Minds.

Transcript

Memfault is making software the most reliable part of the IoT with its device reliability platform that enables teams to be more proactive with remote debugging, monitoring and OTA update capabilities. Try Memfault's new sandbox demo at demo.memfault.com. Embedded.fm listeners receive 25% off their first-year contract with Memfault by booking a demo here: https://go.memfault.com/demo-request-embedded

469: Saving the World Is Not a Hobby

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:

Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories was purchased by Bantam Tools!

Starter soldering irons? It seemed like small pen-style ones were more popular than big soldering stations. See the Adafruit USB C Powered Soldering Iron - Adjustable Temperature Pen-Style - TS80P. Or for much less (but you can write your own firmware!), the Pinecil. And one vote for the RT Soldering Pen on Tindie because it uses Weller RT tips (which are more expensive than the soldering pen but much less expensive than the Weller station that uses the RT tips). 

Embedded Artistry has excellent advice for the role of the firmware in schematic reviews. 

Adafruit Playgrounds looks like a neat place to write up your project. 

SuperMario optimizations.

Transcript

Nordic Semiconductor empowers wireless innovation, by providing hardware, software, tools and services that allow developers to create the IoT products of tomorrow. Learn more about Nordic Semiconductor at nordicsemi.com, check out the DevAcademy at academy.nordicsemi.com and interact with the Nordic Devzone community at devzone.nordicsemi.com.


453: Too Dumb to Quit

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:

He spoke recently at the Embedded Online Conference about Object Oriented Programming (well, really good design practices). He has a related github repository so you can look at the examples for yourself. He also gave a workshop on creating a simple command line interface (another excellent github repo full of examples).

Probably the best place to start is his Embedded for Everyone Wiki where he collects all the bits and pieces you might want to know about getting into embedded systems.

Transcript

446: World’s Best PB&J

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)

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Conferences and happenings:


Transcript

373: Docker! Docker! Docker!

It’s another Elecia and Chris episode and this time we cover handling hourly work when the task doesn’t neatly divide into hours, using Docker (and Conda and Virtualenv) for development, growing the podcast, overdoing conference talks, and trying to find a new laptop. Phew!

The Embedded Online Conference is coming up the week of May 17th 2021, and Elecia’s talk will be Buried Treasure and Map Files (Note: the coupon code is still valid and mentioned early in the episode. Elecia will also put up a copy of her talk on YouTube after some time.)

369: More Pirate Jokes

Chris and Elecia talk with each other about contracting, architecture, origami research, Digilent’s new oscilloscope, TensorFlow, map files, conference talks, art and the upcoming 12AX7 album.

Digilent sent us a pre-production Analog Discovery Pro ADP3450.

Elecia’s Origami Github.

Embedded Patreon

Embedded Online Conference talk Buried Treasure and Map Files (Note: the coupon code from Jacob’s show is still valid and Elecia will put up a copy of her talk on YouTube.)

12XA7, we’ll let you know when the Kickstarter goes live.

283: Flippendo Is Kind of a Swirly

Jennifer Wang (@jenbuilds) spoke with us about machine learning, magic wands, and getting into hardware.

For more detail about her magic wand build, you can see Jen’s Hackaday SuperCon talk or her !!ConWest talk. The github repo is well documented with pointers to slides from her SuperCon talk and an HTML version of her Jupyter notebook.

Check out this good introduction to machine learning from scikit-learn. It was their choosing the right estimator infographic we were looking at. (Elecia has bookmarked this list of machine learning cheat sheets.)

Jennifer’s personal sites are jenbuilds.com and jewang.net. She recommends the Recurse Center and wrote a blog post on her experience there.

267: Cute and Squishy

Lindsey Kuper (@lindsey) spoke with us about !!Con West, being a new professor, and reading technical journals.

The call for speakers for !!Con West is open until November 30, 2018. The conference will be in Santa Cruz, CA on February 23-24.

Lindsey’s blog is Composition.al and it has advice for !!Con proposals, advice for potential grad students, and updates on Lindsay’s work.

The Banana Slug is the UCSC mascot.

Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System by Leslie Lamport, 1978