489: Constructive Cat

Chris and Elecia discuss her origami art show, ponder PRs for solo developers, attempt to explain GDB debugging, and make a to-do list for getting rid of Kanga.

Elecia is having an Origami Octopus Garden art show at the Aptos Public Library for the month of November, 2024. The postcard advertisement is below. There are more pictures on her Instagram (@elecia_white). The python tessellation generator is here.

Memfault’s Interrupt Debugging Firmware with GDB post is a much more considered explanation of GDB and includes pointers to other resources (including using Python with GDB).

Transcript

Memfault is a leading embedded device observability platform that empowers teams to build better IoT products, faster. Its off-the-shelf solution is specifically designed for bandwidth-constrained devices, offering device performance and product analytics, debugging, and over-the-air capabilities. Trusted by leading brands such as Bose, Lyft, Logitech, Panasonic, and Augury, Memfault improves the reliability of devices across consumer electronics and mission-critical industries such as access control, point of sale, energy, and healthcare. To learn more, visit memfault.com.

474: It's All Chaos and Horror

Logic gates and origami? Professor Inna Zakharevich joined us to talk about Turing complete origami crease patterns. 

We started talking about Turing completeness which led to a Conway’s Game of Life-like 2D cellular automaton called Rule 110 (Wikipedia) which can be implemented with logic gates (AND, OR, NOT). These logic gates can be implemented as creases in paper (with the direction of the crease indicating 0 or 1). 

The paper describing the proof is called Flat Origami is Turing Complete (arxiv and PDF). Quanta Magazine has a summary article: How to Build an Origami Computer.

Inna’s page at Cornell University also has the crease patterns for the logic gates (pdf).

Inna is an aficionado of the origami work by Satoshi Kamiya who creates complex and lifelike patterns. 

Some other origami mentioned:

Some other math mentioned:

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

472: Field of Boxes

Making Embedded Systems, 2nd Edition came out today! Chris and Elecia talk about the changes, the writing, but not the eldritch horror. Then we talk about pianos and origami. 

The electronic version is available now on Amazon, ebooks.com, Google Play and where you get your ebooks. The paper copy will be out in about two weeks, you can preorder now. It is also available on the O’Reilly Learning System, here is a  30-day Trial.

See the Embedded.fm Origami and Flex PCBs newsletter, sign up for future newsletters here. 

Memfault is hosting its first launch week of the year! On Tuesday, March 12th, Memfault CEO François Baldassari will showcase how to evaluate the health and performance of your embedded devices clearly within Memfault's observability platform. Join the webinar to discover how simple it is to monitor three necessary device measures: stability, battery, and connectivity. Register today!

448: Little Squiggles All Around

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 the self-soldering circuit. His projects are open source so you can find the information on github.com/CarlBugeja

Carl has a site (carlbugeja.com) and shows his projects on Instagram instagram.com/carl_bugeja

Elecia worked on a zero-heat-flux, deep tissue temperature measurement system.

Transcript

443: Vexing Machines

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 cares what it does it has an awesome name. Though it does what it says (on photos, no real stars were harmed in the making of this podcast).

Jupyter Notebooks on a Circuit Python board.

Elecia’s Yoshimura sine pattern generating Python colab. Also, Rigidly foldable origami gadgets and tessellations is an excellent article about Miura-ori and other rigidly foldable patterns. You can see her patterns over on Instagram. (You can see some of Chris’ photos on his Instagram.)

Transcript

422: It’s Not a Bug, It’s a Feature

Chris and Elecia chat about origami, learning, whether to future proof tools or buy the cheaper option, simulators, and classes.

Elecia is gearing up to teach another Making Embedded Systems course. Sign up if you want to be in the Yellow Seahorses cohort! Sign up early and often. Sign up other people. Ask other people to sign themselves up and even more other people. Well, you get the idea.

Check out Wokwi! While it looks like it is for Arduino from the front page, there is a lot of work going on to support C/C++ APIs such as the one for Raspberry Pi Pico or the Rust one for the ESP32. Please ask a professor what they’d need to use Wokwi in their class!

In episode 158: Programming Is Too Difficult for Humans, we talked about the Ada language and using it on ARM cores. Learn Ada (at AdaCore).

News

Transcript

Thank you to our sponsor this week!

343: Getting Brains to Work

Chris and Elecia discuss transcripts, listener emails, and brains.

We already have a post about the dangers of using Arduino for professional work.

Elecia got a Cricut Maker to help her make origami and then discovered SVG files were editable (Intro to SVG). She’s putting her origami crease patterns in a github repo eleciawhite/origami), where else would you put it?

About brains, Elecia was reading from Smart But Scattered.