483: An Ion of the Highest Fidelity

Rick Altherr spoke with us about high-speed control, complicated systems, and making quantum computers.

If you want to know more about building quantum computers, take a listen to Rick’s MacroFab episode: The Nuts and Bolts of Quantum Computing.

If you want to make your own quantum circuit simulator, it only takes 27 lines of Python: A Quantum Circuit Simulator in 27 Lines of Python.

What about if you actually want to know about quantum computing? Rick suggests Quantum computing for the very curious while we look back at Embedded.fm 344: Superposition, Entanglement, and Interference with Kitty Yeung, talking about her Quantum Computing Comic book and Hackaday lecture series. 

Rick works for IonQ where they do trapped-ion quantum computing (there are different physics methods for making ions dance to the tune of quantum computing).

If you want to talk to Rick, maybe to get his advice about your resume or career prospects, he sets aside a few hours each week to share his wisdom: https://calendly.com/mxshift

You can also find Rick on Mastodon and LinkedIn. He was also the guest on 311: Attack Other People's Refrigerators about security hacking and mentoring.

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480: Surprises Early In The Game

Jerry Twomey spoke with us about his new O’Reilly book Applied Embedded Electronics which covers embedded topics such as EMI, signal processing, control systems and non-ideal components.

Jerry is also the principal engineer at Effective Electrons. His articles are linked from there and you can contact him via the site.

Here is a 30-day trial for the O’Reilly Learning System. You can take a look at Jerry’s Applied Embedded Electronics and Elecia’s Making Embedded Systems as well as hundreds of other books about software, hardware, engineering, and origami. 

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476: Sidetracked by Mining the Moon

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 Unconferece. All videos are available for later watching on YouTube. 

Lee’s personal page is leecyb.org. Their zines are available in their shop. 

Elecia mentioned enjoying There Are No Electrons: Electronics for Earthlings by Kenn Amdahl.

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431: Becoming More of a Smurf

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 company that specializes in hardware security. They are hiring.  

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294: Ludicrous Numbers of LEDs (Repeat)

Mike Harrison (@mikelectricstuf) challenged us to a PIC fight on Twitter. Surprisingly, no blood was shed and we mostly talked about LEDs and art installations.

Mike’s YouTube Channel and his website electricstuff.co.uk

His professional hire-him-to-work-on-your-neat-stuff site is whitewing.co.uk

For driving LEDs, Mike likes the TI TLC5971: 12-Channel, 16-Bit ES-PWM RGB LED Driver with 3.3V Linear Regulator.

411: Batteries Get Upset

Ethan Slattery joined us to talk about animals, animal trackers, and how they work.

Ethan works for Wildlife Computers. They use the Argos Network for data transfer. He was previously at MBARI and worked with Engineers for Exploration as an undergraduate.

Ethan is also known as CrustyAuklet on Twitter and Github. He also has an Instagram page. 

Things mentioned in the show you might want to know more about:

Two of the big tracking databases :

Also, the Cornell Lab of ornithology also maintains a bird specific database that is pretty neat:


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384: What's a Board File?

Liam Cadigan joined us to talk about founding a successful startup from a college capstone project. Liam is a co-founder of InspectAR and worked on the board files the system uses.

Liam can be found on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Check out InspectAR. They are also on Twitter and on Instagram.

The Inventor's Dilemma: The Remarkable Life of H. Joseph Gerber

375: Hiding in Your Roomba

Brittany Postnikoff (@Straithe) spoke with us about scary robots, neat stickers, and contributing to open source projects.

Brittany’s website is straithe.com and her sticker channel is twitch.tv/str41the. Her github repo has curated reading lists on technical topics.

She’s working at Great Scott Gadgets, maker of a variety of hardware tools including Luna, a toolkit for working with USB. (This was mentioned on a previous Embedded show, 337: Not Completely Explode with Kate Tempkin.)

And if you want Embedded merchandise like mugs, mousepads, and wall art, we have a store for you.

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.

294: Ludicrous Numbers of LEDs

Mike Harrison (@mikelectricstuf) challenged us to a PIC fight on Twitter. Surprisingly, no blood was shed and we mostly talked about LEDs and art installations.

Mike’s YouTube Channel and his website electricstuff.co.uk

His professional hire-him-to-work-on-your-neat-stuff site is whitewing.co.uk

For driving LEDs, Mike likes the TI TLC5971: 12-Channel, 16-Bit ES-PWM RGB LED Driver with 3.3V Linear Regulator.

Mike will be at 2019 Hackaday SuperCon!


276: Playing a Song on a Potato

Jesse Rutherford (@BentTronics) gave us an in-depth look at the 555 timer IC (wiki).

Jesse runs Bent-tronics.com and wrote The Ultimate Beginner's Guide to the 555 Timer (Amazon).

Some great 555 projects:

Somehow, despite it being in the plan, we didn’t mention the Evil Mad Scientist The Three Fives Kit: A Discrete 555 Timer which builds a 555 Timer out of discrete parts. If only the creator would come on to talk about it and his other cool projects. Note that EMS also has a great description of how the 555 timer works.

The giveaway is Jesse’s book and the components to build the projects in his book.

245: Tell Me How People Hurt You

Stephen Kraig (@Macro_Ninjaneer) and Parker Dillmann (@LnghrnEngineer), of Macrofab (@MacroFab) joined us to chat about getting hardware and software to work together.

Stephen and Parker are also hosts of the Macrofab podcast.

We compared out-the-ordinary podcast guests. For MacroFab episode 112 it was their conversation with a patent lawyer. For Embedded episode 150 it was our conversation with a tax accountant.

Schematics for the Apollo Guidance Computer (and their Kicad replica on github).

171: Perfectly Good Being Square and Green

Saar Drimer of Boldport (@boldport) spoke with us about the crossover of art to electronics and building a business around it. 

Monthly, the Boldport Club ships aesthetically-pleasing electronics kits. We discussed past projects include The Lady and Touchy on the show. The seahorse board is on the blog.

Micah Scott (@scanlime) has entrancing videos of putting together the first club project (Pease) and second one (Superhero).

Saar uses PCBMode to create his circuits. He also wrote the tool. It is open source.

Cratejoy is used for the sales and shipping logistics. 

3: Plenty of candy, no guns

​Elecia White and Phil King of Weekend Engineering talk about things a hardware engineer wants software engineers to know. Drifting a bit from topic to topic, they touch on interviewing, oscilloscopes, ways to light hardware on fire, why they work on projects at home and writing novels.

Some links from the show:​

Phil works at Lytro making amazing cameras.​ Elecia and Phil have worked at Leapfrog and ShotSpotter together. Very different products.

Phil's oscilloscope (the one Elecia borrows) is a Tektronix DPO4034.​

At Phil's instigation, Elecia wrote a space opera novel for NaNoWriNo a few years back.​ (If you contact us, you can have a PDF for free. But really, she wrote it in a month, what do you expect? Buy her real book to get the good stuff.)

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