45: Yanking on a cat's tail is the only way to learn

David Anders (Google+) joined Elecia to chat about open source hardware, what it means, how to do it, and why. 

Dave will be speaking at the embedded Linux conference in San Jose, CA on April 30th:

Open Source Hardware Association describes the gradient of open source hardware.

Sigrok looks at open source and open source friendly tools

Dave works for CircuitCo, manufacturers of the mysteriously elusive BeagleBone Black. While he didn't explain their absence (other than they are super popular for OEM'ing), he did announce the brand new Intel-based MinnowBoard MAX.

Some open source tools we discussed included Tin Can Tool's 40 pin DIP Linux processor, Flyswatter, and Flyswatter 2.

Also, check out Dave's past eLinux presentations.

 

44: Light Up strikes back

Josh Chan and Tarun Pondicherry, founders of Light Up (@Lightup or on Facebook), returned to the show. In episode 7, they were midway through their kickstarter, planning to make a product to teach electronics to elementary and middle school students. They've start shipping, even distributing, their MiniKits (other kits will ship soon!). 

Elecia asks them if building their business and shipping the product went according to plan. 

43: A lot of high-falutin’ math

Tony Rios from MEMSIC spoke with Elecia about inertial systems and tuning algorithms used in sensor fusion (i.e. Kalman). The IMU380 will appear soon, creating a whole line of relatively inexpensive quality inertial measurement and inertial navigation systems. 

Tony has a  few embedded systems and algorithms positions open, for example, embedded software engineer. Email hr@memsic.com (note you heard it in the podcast so Elecia gets brownie points). 

41: Pink universes die really quickly

Micah Elizabeth Scott (@scanlime) came to talk about Fadecandy, a really neat way to control smart LEDs (NeoPixel, AdaFruit's term for the WS2812). The conversation ranged from beautiful LED control algorithms and open source embedded projects to triangle tessellations, art, and identity. 

AdaFruit has a great intro to Fadecandy.

Fadecandy is open source hardware and software, see the repository.

Micah's blog is a combo of art and technology.

Burning Man's Ardent Mobile Cloud (also a lovely still pic).

Elecia also mentioned Deep Darc's hack of the GE Color Effects lights.


40: Mwahaha session

Evil Mad Scientist's Lenore Edman (@EMSL) talks about what evil mad scientists do on their path to world domination. Surprisingly, it consists largely of art, education, and soldering. 

Some EMS items we talked about:

We also mentioned Maker Faire, a wonderful community, and Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog.

There is a give away on this show: EMS's Snap-O-Lantern kit. Tweet to Elecia (@logicalelegance) or contact the show. Send in the name of the author of the final quote, first one to do so wins the kit! [Update: Matthew J has won the kit!]

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. 

BiaSportWatchBlue.png

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