482: Reference the Same Dog Object

Dr. Colleen Lewis joined us to talk teaching pointers with stuffies, explaining inheritance through tigers, and computer science pedagogy.

Check out her YouTube channel to view her videos explaining CS concepts with physical models. These are also collected on her website: Physical Models of Java.

If you are an instructor (or thinking about teaching CS), check out Colleen’s CS Teaching Tips. You may also be interested in some other research:

Colleen is an Assistant Professor at University Illinois, Urbana-Champaign’s Siebel School of Computing and Data Science. You can find her papers on Google Scholar (including studies on teaching and learning). 

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.

465: Dinosaurs, Pirates, Spaceships

Yanina Bellini Saibene joined us to discuss teaching, localization, barriers to learning coding, and global communities. 

Yani works on Teach Tech Together (https://teachtogether.tech/) with Greg Wilson. It is a fantastic resource if you are learning to teach. It is available in English and Spanish. She also works on The Carpentries which teaches coding and data science skills to researchers worldwide. 

Yani has a site (yabellini.netlify.app) that includes the courses she has online (for free). She is also the community manager of rOpenSci and is part of R-Ladies.

You can find Yani on fosstodon.org/@yabellini.

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

460: I Don’t Care What Your Math Says

Author, engineer, manager, and professor, Dr. Greg Wilson joined Elecia to talk about teaching, science in computer science, ethics, and policy.

The request for curriculum that started the conversation was the Cost of Change, part of NeverWorkInTheory which summarizes scientific literature about software development. 

Greg is the founder of Software Carpentry, a site that creates curriculum for teaching software concepts (including data and library science). Software Carpentry has great lessons for those who want to learn about software, data, and library science. It is a great site if you are teaching, trying to get someone else to teach, learning, or looking for some guidance on how to do the above. Check out their reading list.

Greg’s site is The Third Bit. Here you can find his books including full copies of several of his books including The Architecture of Open Source Applications, Teaching Tech Together, and most recently Software Design by Example. 

Transcript

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

424: Between Midnight and 6am

Gustavo Pezzi spoke with us about using fun and simple systems to explain low-level concepts and how they work in higher-level engineering tasks. For example, teaching microprocessor concepts using Atari 2600 assembly and physics by creating a simple game engine.

Gustavo’s site is Pikuma.com. He has a free taster course on bit-shifting. We also talked about Atari 2600 Programming with 6502 Assembly and Physics Game Engine Programming. 

Stella, a multi-platform Atari 2600 emulator

For examples of optimizing in different ways, check out this bit hacks page.

Gustavo is mentoring for Classpert’s Building a Language course. (This is where Elecia teaches Making Embedded Systems.)

The conjecture about a shortage of  electrical engineers was from The Register.

Transcript

423: Speaking of Aardvarks

Phillip Johnston joined us to talk about how engineering approaches can change over time. 

This conversation started with Phillip’s Embedded Artistry blog post How Our Approach to Abstract Interfaces Has Changed Over the Years. His new course is Designing Embedded Software for Change. 

Embedded Artistry has a Design Pattern Catalogue (though Elecia was looking at Software design patterns on Wikipedia during the podcast). https://github.com/embvm 

Phillip is working with Memfault on an ongoing embedded systems panel. The first topic they covered was observability metrics for IoT devices. There is a panel coming up on how to debug embedded devices in production.

Some reading that Phillip mentioned:

Creating a Circular Buffer in C and C++ - Embedded Artistry

Aardvark I2C/SPI Host Adapter - Total Phase 

Transcript

403: Engineers Are a Difficult People

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 Up Raspberry Pi Pico C/C++ Toolchain on Windows with VS Code.

Shawn talked about Discovery-Driven Growth: A Breakthrough Process to Reduce Risk and Seize Opportunity by Rita Gunther McGrath and Ian C. Macmillan. He referenced  Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant by W. Chan Kim and Renée A. Mauborgne

Elecia enjoyed The Visual Mba: Two Years of Business School Packed into One Priceless Book of Pure Awesomeness by Jason Barron

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Transcript

374: Getting Rafty

Tenaya Hurst Conklin (@TenayaHurst) discussed STEAM teaching tools and kits from RAFT (@RAFTBayArea). 

RAFT is at raft.net. The Abiotic Dissection activity is pretty amusing (from the STEAM Learning Sheets) as are the games in the idea sheets. They also have a summer camp and a Youtube channel.

Tenaya’s website is roguemaking.com. She was previously on Embedded 49: Is that an Arduino in your pocket?

303: Kids, Turn in Your Chips

Jay Carlson (@jaydcarlson) is back on the show to discuss education and the techniques he’s using to teach embedded systems.

Jay has some great posts on his jaycarlson.net blog. The one related to this show was entitled “How I Teach Embedded Systems.” Jay was also on Embedded 226: Camp AVR Vs. Camp Microchip where we discussed his fantastic survey of micros in The Amazing $1 Microcontroller. We also mentioned one of his recent posts about 3 cent micros.

Teaching has many different approaches. We talked about Bloom’s taxonomy and mentioned the Dreyfus model of skill acquisition.