486: A Nice Rainbow Dream

Antoine van Gelder spoke to us about making digital musical instruments, USB, and FPGAs. 

Antoine works for Great Scott Gadgets, specifically on the Cynthion USB protocol analysis tool that can be used in conjunction with Python and GSG’s FaceDancer to act as a new USB device. 

While bonding over MurderBot Diaries was a given, Antoine also mentioned NAND2Tetris which Elecia countered with The Elements of Computing Systems: Building a Modern Computer from First Principles, the book that covers the NAND2Tetris material.

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.

467: Temporary Axolotl

Chris and Elecia talk about cars, fleeting moments of fame, their year, and the sorry state of tools in the embedded space.

Chris became internet famous for asking a car dealership’s chatbot (powered by ChatGPT) to generate Python code for fluid dynamics problems. After this, someone else asked the chatbot to sell a car for $1. 

Pass the Bricks is an organization that takes Lego bricks and turns them into sets for kids who don’t have any. Speaking of re-use, contact the show if you’d like to get in touch with Nelson.

Chris is on 4 tracks on Flavigula’s album Nine Sided Die. He also enjoyed putting together an EMSL Bulbdial clock kit. 

Elecia will be speaking at the Embedded Online Conference.

Transcript

433: Getting Mad About Capes

Michael Gielda spoke with us about Renode, an open source embedded systems simulator. It also simulates large distributed systems and network communications. 

Check out Renode.io and the boards supported by Renode and Zephyr on Renodepedia. Elecia played with the Nucleo F401 tutorial on colab.

Michael is the co-founder of Antmicro.

The ESP32-C3 is a commercial RISC-V core with WiFi and BLE.

We also mentioned Wokwi on the show. (And we had its creator Uri Shaked as a guest on episode 396: Untangle the Mess

Transcript

410: Emacs From the Future

Chris and Elecia chat about tools, interrupts, and general happenings. 

Thank you to Newark for supporting the show! The part that was not guessed was an RF FET: MRF1K50HR5.

Elecia found MCU on Eclipse (Eric Styger)’s tutorials on Visual Studio Code for C/C++ with ARM Cortex-M (Part 1).

Embedded has a Patreon page where you can get access to the Slack group. The book club is starting Prototype to Product: A Practical Guide for Getting to Market by Alan Cohen.

Wokwi Raspberry Pi Pico projects from Elecia: Command Line Interface and PWM Experiments with Logic Analyzer

Phillip Johnston of Embedded Artistry and Tyler Hoffman from Memfault are kicking off a quarterly embedded discussion panel. This month is about building embedded systems at scale using device metrics: Embedded Device Observability Metrics Panel 

Jonathan Beri from Golioth created instructions on how to use USB from WSL2.

Copy-editing game.

Transcript.

Thank you to Newark for sponsoring this episode of Embedded!

395: I Can No Longer Play Ping Pong

Tyler Hoffman joined us to talk about developing developer tools and how to drag your organization out of the stone age.

You can use GDB and Python together? Yes, yes you can. And it will change your debugging habits. (You can find many other great posts from Memfault’s Interrupt blog including one about Unit Testing Basics.) 

Tyler is a co-founder at Memfault (memfault.com), a company that works on IoT dashboards and embedded tools. On Twitter, Tyler is @ty_hoff and Memfault is @Memfault.

Control-R is a history search in shell commands (magical!). The fuzzy search tool discussed is FZF (probably even more magical!).

XKCD comic referenced: xkcd.com/1319 

Fitbit’s Tower of Terror Bug

390: Irresponsible At the Time

Tyler Hoffman joined us to discuss the issues associated with embedded devices at consumer scale. We talked about firmware update, device management, and remote diagnostics for millions of devices.

Tyler is a co-founder at Memfault (memfault.com), a company that works on IoT dashboards and embedded tools. (We will invite Tyler back to talk about embedded tools but someone was preparing a lecture on firmware update and device management.)

Tyler writes for Memfault’s Interrupt blog which has excellent advice including the mentioned article about Defensive Programming. You can also find him and Memfault on Twitter: @ty_hoff, @Memfault.

Elecia is teaching Making Embedded Systems at ClasspertX, a high-quality MOOC with video lectures, quizzes, exercises, synchronous discussions classes, and a portfolio-worthy final project. The alpha cohort starts in early November and the course will run again in Q1 2022.

180: Chickens in Helmets

Have you ever wondered how your programming tool works? Piotr Esden-Tempski and Gareth McMullin have built the Black Magic Probe and joined the show to explain how it works.

Kickstarter for Black Magic and 1Bitsy ends December 29th. If you missed it (or need a Black Magic v2 instead of waiting for v2.1) go to the 1BitSquared Store. For more in-depth information about Black Magic, look at Gareth's github repo. For more information about the 1Bitsey dev board, look at 1bitsy.org. 

Contest! Tweet to @1bitsquared.

The YouTube channel about electronic teardowns was Mike's Electric Stuff: youtube.com/user/mikeselectricstuff.

If you want to say other hellos to Piotr, try his personal account: @esden. Or you can contact Gareth via Black Magic's Gitter channel. 

Embedded.fm Hats-n-Hacks party will be 2-5pm on Saturday, January 28, 2017 in Aptos, CA. More details soon, including how to RSVP.

163: Syringes That Give You Cake

Nadya Peek (@nadyapeek) joined us to talk about making machines that build things. 

Nadya's website is infosyncratic.nl, which includes her blog. Nadya's dissertation defense on Making Machines that Make: Object-Oriented Hardware Meets Object-Oriented Software was standing room only.

MIT Center For Bits and Atoms, which studies "how to turn data into things, and things into data."

Mods.cba.mit.edu

Machines that Make: MTM.cba.mit.edu

2: My little pony stopped outputting

Elecia (@logicalelegance) and Jen (@r0b0ts0nf1r3) compare multimeters then install the Saleae Logic to debug a problem. Elecia pines for a nifty oscilloscope.

Some products discussed on the show:

Saleae Logic USB Logic Analyzer (and direct Saleae website)

(Somewhat expensive) Fluke Digital Multimeter

TPI 120 Compact Digital Multimeter (El's desk meter)

BK Manual Ranging Tool Kit Digital Multimeter (El's other meter, not Burger King!)

Radio Shack  22-801 (Jen's home meter)

Excellent article on SPI protocol on WIkipedia

​Board with SPI devices that was debugged during the show.