Patrick Kane (@PSoC_Nation) is the director of the Cypress University Alliance, working with colleges to provide development kits and information to college (and high school) students.
Happily, Patrick brought Elecia a new dev kit: CY8CKIT-042.
Producer Christopher (@stoneymonster) joins Elecia to look through their mailbag and talk about gift ideas.
Podcasts we like:
Some listener suggestions on where to get small run boards made:
Gift ideas (specifics):
Gift ideas (stores):
James Grenning (@jwgrenning) joined Elecia to talk about how to be a good programmer using Test Driven Development (TDD).
James' excellent book on how to use TDD: Test Driven Development for Embedded Systems
Take a class from Renaissance Software
Manual test is not sustainable blog post, from James' blog
Legacy code challenge from Github
Iterative and Incremental Development article by Craig Larman
Untapped: the beer drinker's twitter
To get the signed copy of James' book, email (show@embedded.fm), tweet (@logicalelegance), or hit the contact link on embedded.fm with your number between 0-99. First one with the correct number wins the book (if no one is correct, the closest number will be selected 12/25/13).
Kathleen Vaeth of MicroGen Systems (@MicroGenSystems) spoke with Elecia (@LogicalElegance) about energy harvesting using MEMS devices.
Some introductory videos:
While we missed it on the show, Kathleen also wanted to mention MicroGen Systems' finite element modeling partners: SoftMEMS and Open Engineering.
Author Laura Lemay (@lemay) spoke with Elecia (@logicalelegance) about writing books, APIs, code, and science fiction.
Laura wrote many of the Teach Yourself ... in 21 Days books: her bibliography on Amazon.
Laura's blog includes short stories.
November is National Novel Writing Month, see the NaNoWriMo site
Edward Tufte wrote the amazing Envisioning Information (among many other beautiful and informative books)
Neal Stephenson wrote Diamond Age
Laura suggests Patrick Ness' The Knife of Never Letting Go
From the MEMS Industry Group Executive Congress:
From the 2013 IEEE Global Humanitarian Technology Conference:
In this in-depth technical discussion, Dr. Ken Lunde helps Elecia understand how to internationalize her (memory constrained) device.
CJVK Information Processing, Ken’s excellent O’Reilly book on internationalization [Note: there is a 40% off print and 50% off ebook coupon in the last few minutes of the show.]
Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP)
Images of the bone ideograph that is different between
Chinese and Japanese (U+9AA8) can be found on Wikipedia.
Other sources of information:
Open source type faces
Adobe’s open source projects and Ken’s contribution to those:
You can also reach Ken via lunde "at" adobe.com
Jen Costillo surfaced briefly from her startup-induced blackout to share her wisdom about manufacturing consumer products. They discussed new product development and working from (and making modifications to) Hacker Dojo in Mountain View, CA. Jen and Elecia pined for this (probably not really a two pack) microscope.
Listener Jim Gf posed an interesting question about how to tell if you are a good embedded software engineer. Producer Christopher White joins Elecia to fail to give an answer. While they mention the embedded C test, they devolve into "why would you ask that question?", impostor syndrome, and methods for dealing with it.
(Normally our podcasts are recorded during the day but this one was after a long, fairly grueling day for the co-hosts. You may hear the clink of glass as we drank a nice Pinot Noir from Hahn Winery.)
Jeri Ellsworth joins Elecia to talk about about co-founding Technical Illusions and their virtual and augmented reality product CastAR. Jeri gives an in-depth introduction to virtual reality, augmented reality and motion sickness. They also talk about hardware engineers working with software engineers, the CastAR's Kickstarter, children's toys, and tagging sharks for science.
Jordan Hart from Digital Media Academy joined Elecia to discuss ways to make science, technology, and engineering fun for kids through Minecraft, Arduino robotics, and music.
DMA video: Robotics and Electrical Engineering with
Arduino
Ted talk: The child-driven education which describes the "method of the grandmother" teaching style.
Georgia Tech online CS Master's degree
Sincere apologies to fans of Gottfried Leibnitz, he had a truly amazing career that went well beyond calculus, read about it on Wikipedia.
Rob Mitchell and Elecia discuss management, what they like about project schedules, and lessons learned on the path from engineer to manager.
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
Karen Field (@karenfield) and Elecia talk about 2014 DesignWest, the embedded systems conference, and how to submit your idea for a session.
2014 DesignWest is March 31 - April 3, 2014.
Call for abstracts is open, submit your idea!
Speaker benefits include speaker room, speaker party, full conference pass, conversation starting badge for networking, plus resume fodder.
Elecia White and Amy Button discuss Amy's dream of going to Mars, her previous role in training astronauts to handle disasters, and her current work on a magic box of rocks that will keep Orion's air breathable.
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.
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
Andreas Eieland (@AndreasMCUguy) from Atmel joined Elecia to talk about how the AVR processor line came to life, why there is an AVR in Arduino, and the spirit of making things.
OpenCores AVR FPGA implementation
Elecia’s new dev kit is a SAM D20 Xplained Pro
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]
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.
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.