510: The Secret Chip

Christina Cyr spoke with us about building cell phones, entrepreneurship, social purpose corporations, awards, lithium recycling, and her interesting career path. 

We talked about Christina’s Cyrcle Phone, the related kit from dTOOR, and her CES Innovation Award. We also mentioned Fairphone in the section about social purpose corporation.

There is a great paper from Nature about lithium-ion battery recycling: The evolution of lithium-ion battery recycling | Nature Reviews Clean Technology. The US EPA meetings mentioned in the show are part of the Extended Battery Producer Responsibility (EPR) Framework.

Christina Cyr Personal Website 

Wellfound (formerly AngelList) is a startup focused job site that may lead to non-fulltime positions. Crunchbase may help you figure out is the startup has capital (also Pitchbook thought that generally has a cost).

ADH connectors by JST and the SparkFun JST Battery Removal Tool

The quote was from Hemlock & Silver by T Kingfisher and it was a lovely fantasy mystery with an incredible first chapter.

Note: there are some audio artifacts on Christina’s track, we apologize as there was a technical issue that couldn’t be resolved. We’ve tried to clean it up with post-processing. There’s nothing wrong with your headphones :)

Transcript

If you’re interested in how 3D printing is changing design engineering, Mouser Electronics has some great resources to check out. Their Empowering Innovation Together platform is taking a deep dive into additive manufacturing—covering smarter production, faster prototyping, and breakthrough materials that move ideas beyond prototypes into real-world products. You’ll find podcasts, expert articles, and videos that keep you informed and inspired. Sound like your thing? Head to Mouser.com/empowering-innovation and explore.

478: The Map Is Not the Territory

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, or Mastodon.

Transcript

407: Boards Are Like Sandwiches

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 leading international distributor of industrial and electronic components. From design and testing to production and maintenance, discover why so many choose to partner with Newark!


350: The State of the Empire Is Good

Ben Hencke (@ledmage, @im889) updated us on blinking lights and running a small hardware business. You can find the current PixelBlaze in the ElectoMage store on Tindie (tindie.com/stores/electromage/) or signup for a shiny new version on CrowdSupply.

Ben’s personal site (bhencke.com) has lots of projects including a page devoted to the awesome Pixelblaze projects (including the BioTronEsis alien light sea creatures which someone who hosts this show hopes will be in her Christmas stocking and the post about leaded solder discussed in the show).

When Ben is making Pixelblaze, the brand is ElectroMage (electromage.com/) so you can see more about Pixelblaze there including the forum.

We didn’t talk about TapGlo, the arcade ping pong table that Ben is also working on.

Favorite solder paste: LOCTITE GC 10 paste (henkel-adhesives)

About his favorite acronym, Ben says, “XMLHttpRequest is my favorite because it perfectly illustrates how we're (developers) bad at naming things and like to come up with arbitrary rules for things. The story about how XML is all caps and Html is camel case is just too perfect, and it's popular use rarely has anything to do with XML”

Finally, There are 40 different flavors of Kit Kat. There are 12 flavors of candy corn, they all taste the same.