39: I blame space

Jen Costillo (@r0b0ts0nf1r3) joined Elecia to talk about Jen's start-up: Bia Sport (@BiaSport). They discuss the difficulties of being in an underfunded start-up as well as the joys of shipping a new product and their upcoming conference talks.

Jen discussed the company's focus on safety and privacy at the DesignCon sponsored Geek Girl Dinner. She will be speaking at :

Elecia will also be speaking at EELive, on how the internet of things isn't serving consumers very well on Thursday, April 03, 2014 at 1pm, though the talk title keeps changing. 

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38: Blame the monkey

Producer Chris White (@stoneymonster) and Elecia discuss some insurmountable problems and some strategies for approaching them. 

  • Google it (or look on Stack Exchange).
  • Explain the problem to someone else… even if they aren't there (use a stuffed animal or write a really detailed email, anticipating potential questions).
  • Draw a picture (system/subsystem architecture or code block diagram or a doodle).
  • Make sure you are running what you think you are, start over from a blank slate, making no assumptions about how your hardware is programmed.
  • Identify and verify your assumptions about the all the pieces involved.
  • Get scientific: define the problem, create a hypothesis, run an experiment, record the results. Small steps! Also: get methodological and write everything down.
  • Return to first principals: how is this supposed to work?
  • Revert to last known good and diff to find the cause of a new issue.
  • Logging functions: they take time but can lead to a better trace, better picture.

  • Make it reproducible: there is information in the solution if you can find the steps to repro. Step by step, reduce the steps until you can nab it in the act. Remove the voodoo.

  • Avoidance: accept the bug (it's a feature!) and go on.
  • Sleep, go for a walk, or work on something else.


37: Surf's up

Dr. Karen Shell and Elecia talk about modelling vs. building models, ocean albedo vs. ice, climate vs. weather, and science vs. policy. They gloat about being on vacation only intermittently.

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)

NASA's climate change home 

Help run climate models on your home computer at climateprediction.net

Karen's class will be looking at data from NOAA's Climate at a Glance

36: Drive the boat with a Wii mote

Elecia gushes about her favorite logic (and protocol) analyzer to Saleae co-founder Mark Garrison. They also discuss start-ups, manufacturing, and covering yourself with rum and pretending to be a pirate when harbor patrol arrives. 

Saleae Logic 8 on Amazon (or from Saleae)

Saleae Logic 16 on Amazon (or from Saleae)

Space X reusable rocket video

Saleae's blog talks about Mark and Joe's boat, start here

The mooshimeter multimeter (as seen on Hackaday and Dragon Innovation)

35: All these different reasons why you might want to do something

Want to learn how to get from idea to schematic, through layout, all the way to physical boards? Elecia spoke with Chris Gammell about his Contextual Electronics course to teach the missing steps between what an EE learns in college and what an design engineer's job entails.

Chris is co-host of the excellent electronics podcast The Amp Hour and author of Chris Gammell's Analog Life. On twitter, contact Chris via @Chris_Gammell or ask questions about the course @ContextualElec.

We mentioned UT Austin's online embedded systems course which starts soon as well.

Contextual Electronics includes some in-depth KiCad instruction. Some intro (and free) KiCad tutorials:

33: Quitting my Finnish lessons

Alison Chaiken (Google+) and Elecia discuss what you need to know to get into development for the automotive market. 

Check out Alison's she-devel site for a big list of links and resources or go to a Silicon Valley Automotive Open Source Group meetup to say hello. A small subset:

CORRECTION: In the show, Elecia talks about airplane certification levels as though only the size of the plane matters. As listener Burko points out, the certification level also depends on how critical the subsystem is. Those seatback tray tables don't have to be certified to DO178A, but the artificial horizon does.]

31: If you see a dongle run away

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):

 

30: Eventually lightning strikes

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

SOLID design principles

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).

29: Ducking the quadcopter

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.

28: A lot of wish fulfillment

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

27: You are blowing my mind

From the MEMS Industry Group Executive Congress:

From the 2013 IEEE Global Humanitarian Technology Conference:

  • David Peter works with New Life International. His paper was “A Simple Algorithm for Chlorine Concentration Control”

 

26: The tofu problem

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:

  • Adobe Blank is a special-purpose OpenType font, making webpages wait to load fonts until they have the correct one
  • AGL and AGLFN (Adobe Glyph List) maps glyph names to Unicode values
  • CMap Resources are used to unidirectionally map character codes
  • CSS Orientation Test are lightweight and special-purpose OpenType fonts that map all Unicode code points to glyphs that indicate their orientation based on the writing direction.
  • Kenten Generic OpenType Font  provides glyphs suitable for typesetting emphasis marks in Japanese.
  • Mapping Resources for PDF are used to derive content from PDF files that include CJK (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) information. 

You can also reach Ken via lunde "at" adobe.com  

 

24: I'm a total fraud

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.)

 

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23: Go for everything that I want

 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.

 

22: Minecraft is the new Apple II

 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. 


 

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