20: Soldered together by monkeys

Phil King of Weekend Engineering returned to give Elecia advice on how to fabricate a board, both in a professional capacity and for garage projects. 

EaglePCB is a commercial package which is also available as a free, noncommercial version for small 2-layer boards. Other open source packages mentioned include Kicad and gEDA. Some board fabricators provide free tools that work only with their fab houses (such as ExpressPCB).  Digikey's SchemeIt  provides a way to get a PDF schematic (and a BOM), but falls down by not providing a way to generate a net list, a critical part of board fabrication.

PCB West is this week at the Santa Clara convention center.

How Printed Circuit Boards are Designed (1960 Edition)

Hildy  Licht electronic assembly and manufacturing

17: Facebook status: maybe not dead

Elecia White spoke with Elizabeth Brenner about devices that can be used to help families worry less about grandparents who live alone (and 87-year-old neighbor friends named Dolores).

 Life Alert is the big name in senior push-button call systems. Life Call are the "Help, I've fallen and I can't get up" people. (See the commercial!) Life Call and Lileline have accelerometers to detect falls.

Twilio allows programs to send and receive phone calls and text messages using its web service APIs. 

If This Then That (ifttt.com) connects channels to allow an event to trigger other events (i.e. "failed to twitter today" -> text family) .

Fibit API for connecting Fitbit data to other applications.

We didn't talk about this but it is a similar idea: Goodnight lamp.

 

16: Democracy is the worst form of government

Elecia tries to get a handle on whether Agile works with embedded software.  Curtis Cole (@citizencurtis) argues in favor of user stories, scrums, and story points.

Agile software development on Wikipedia

Test Driven Development for Embedded C by James Grenning

"Many forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." Winston Churchill

 

14: Hot

 Artist Kristin Anderson of Idle Creativity spoke with Elecia about the technology of working with slumped glass, getting started on Etsy (Elecia mentioned her craft electronic ideas), and moving from Silicon Valley technology to artistic pursuits.

Kristin's Etsy store, blog, and Facebook page

Elecia's intial craft electronics idea and some followup

Great book for getting started: Contemporary Fused Glass

Kristin suggests Marketing Creativity and  Handmadeology as blogs to help build a craft business

Etsy is a great resource for learning to use Etsy: forums and video tutorials. 

Bullseye Glass, see classes, especially "Set Your Kiln on Fire" [That does sound fun! -El]

Monte Vista embedded Linux

Kristin suggests Marketing Creativity and  Handmadeology as blogs to help build a craft business

Etsy is a great resource for learning to use Etsy: forums and video tutorials. 

 

 

13: Introspective nasal gazing

Christopher White ( @stoneymonster) emerges from his producer responsibilities to chat with Elecia about starting a podcast: the gadgetry, the software, the distribution, and, the big question, why we do it.

Links from the show: 

Libsyn, a dedicated podcast audio hosting service.

SquareSpace, fast and easy website building and hosting.

5x5, Dan Benjamin's (@danbenjamin) phenomenal podcast network.

Starting a podcast, Dan's guide to podcast equipment. 

 

11: Tell me I'm wrong, it's fine

Karen Lightman () joins Elecia White to talk about the infinite awesomeness of tiny MEMS devices. Recorded at the (somewhat noisy but lovely and delicious) Blue Brasserie during SEMICON West.

Karen is the Executive Director of the MEMS Industry Group, the nonprofit trade association advancing MEMS across global markets. This the group that wrote the standard definitions that make MEMS easier to use, see the Resources section of their website.

MEMS Executive Congress in Napa, Nov 7-8. Please bring new MEMS devices to the pitch event (Elecia is a judge!). 

They mentioned some ignorance of RF MEMS, looks like someone need to read this book.

Energy harvesting kits we discussed were from MicroGen. They have a neat youtube video.

Redux of the Feynman's There's More Room at the Bottom  lecture.

 

10: Hands off, baby

Jen Costillo (@r0b0ts0nf1r3) joins Elecia White to discuss the secret parts of C, keywords that only embedded software engineers seem to know about.

They talk about interviewing and why these keywords make good questions for finding folks who use the language to its full potential. On the show they mention a list of embedded interview questions with answers. (Note: Elecia's book has many excellent interview questions and what interviewers look for when they ask them.)

Producer Christopher White sends along a more concise introduction to the often unused register keyword. 

 

 

 

 

9: Kidnapped and blindfolded

Randi Eckstein grilled Elecia White (@logicalelegance) on inertial sensors: when to use accelerometers vs. gyroscopes; gyroscopes vs. rate sensors; how to make an inertial measurement unit; the basics of quaternions and Kalman filters; what products need which sensors (and why).

Other good resources:

 

7: Lights, camera, electrons

Josh Chan and Tarun Pondicherry, founders of Light Up, join Elecia White to talk about how to teach electronics to elementary and middle school students. The Light Up Kickstarter ends on June 30, 2013, click on that link to buy your kit or to see the video (including the augmented reality smartphone application).

We also talked about going on Kickstarter, being a startup and about HAXLR8R, an accelerator to help hardware startups.

El's version of the traffic model of analog electronic components came from There Are No Electrons: Electronics for Earthlings.

 

 

6: Do robot squirrels dream of electric imps...

Matt Haines (@BeardedInventor) of Electric Imp joins Elecia White to discuss how to connect cats (and other things) to the Internet.

Buy an Imp on Adafruit but don't forget the adapter (aka April board). Get started with programming in Squirrel and find hardware details in the developer section of Electric Imp.

We also mentioned Lockitron, a commercial product that uses Electric Imp.

 

5: Passion is contagious

Akkana Peck (@akkakk) joins Elecia White to talk about an introduction to Arduino workshop for high school students.

Arduino boards are a fantastic way to encourage people into embedded systems. The boards are cheap, the starter kits are great, there are lots of things you can do with them, and the compiler software is free.

Akkana's site (Shallow Sky) has the workshop outline, going from morning general activities to afternoon specific ones. The really simple circuit for the photo-theremin we had on the show is linked from there (and the latest code is on github). A separate post describes the the cheap motor boards she's been working on, including the specific chips (including the H-bridge).

The summer camp we discussed is GetSET and they eloquently describe themselves as "a program for high school girls of underrepresented ethnic groups to show them that engineering is fun, is creative, improves lives, and is an exciting career option". It is free to the student, funded through the efforts of the Santa Clara Society of Women Engineers (SWE) chapter.

To volunteer for Akkana's workshop (Wednesday June 26, 9am-4pm at Santa Clara University) contact her on twitter or email us here at the show (show@makingembeddedsysetms.com).

 

 

 

4: Are we not lawyers?

Elecia and Chris (@stoneymonster) discuss why they chose to go into consulting and what they've learned while building Logical Elegance into the company it is.

SCORE is a great resource for small business, even consulting firms.  Also check your local small business administration (SBA) chapter.

Elecia's salary to rate conversion can be found as a Google spreadsheet. 

Chris suggests Crash plan and Backblaze for backing up your client specific virtual machines (and everything else!).

If you have specific requests, drop us a note via the contact link on embedded.fm or by emailing show@makingembeddedsystems.com

 

 

 

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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2: My little pony stopped outputting

Elecia (@logicalelegance) and Jen () 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.

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